


The Midnight Hour

by nothinbuttherain



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Adventure, Apocalypse, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Soulbond AU, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 64,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4749461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothinbuttherain/pseuds/nothinbuttherain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The living walk in a dead world. She walks in a dark one. They survive. They dream. They pray. They survive. For the fact that they shouldn’t. For the ones that they’ve lost. For spite. For rebellion. For defiance. For dreams. For love. For hope. They survive. " </p><p>AU set 97 years before the events of canon in the AI-caused nuclear apocalypse that wiped out almost all of humanity, driving some into space and the Ark to survive but leaving others alone and hopeless on Earth. Following Marcus/Abby as they would have been had they been the first generation of Grounderswhere they struggle to contend with the warn-torn world fraught with new and old dangers that pushes them past any limits they might once had had + Soulbond AU: only able to see in black and white until you fall in love with your soulmate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1 - The Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maegfen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maegfen/gifts).



_Part 1 – The Fall_

She walks in darkness. Hidden by shadow and blinded by light. Coveted both by the demons that dwell in the haunted pits of her eyes and by angels that dare to cling to the fraying edges of dreams.

The world ended the day the bombs fell and left the few survivors the searing wave of heat and radiation didn’t claim scattered, wounded and hopeless.

Each day the sun rises to reveal bloody fire, smoke still rising from the scorched earth and ruins they had once, somehow, called home. They have no homes no. No place here. No purpose. They are humanity’s last defiant act in a world that no longer wants them, that should no longer know them.

They survived the impossible, the nuclear blast designed, but failed, to kill them all, they survived. Their hearts still dare to beat, their lungs till dare to take in the toxic, burning air, their skin bears witness to the wounds that failed to kill them, the scars that mark their bodies is their proof of life, their medals of valour in a world where even to breathe is to be brave.

Her dreams carry her into the past, borne upon the back of exhaustion, to the life she had before. But they never provide solace or comfort for her; they serve only as a brutal reminder of what she lost the day they should have died.

She still dreams of colour. Hot, burning reds flavour her lover’s lips as much as the cherries she remembers tasting when she kissed him. Bright, sweet yellow hovers over every stolen memory, the sun tinting everything with scarlet and gold, orange and pink, warmth she can feel against her skin, in her soul. The same sun ushers in her days now but it hangs in the sky, a pale, dead spectre, as white as a corpse.

Her days are spent longing for dreams; she hopes for dreams when she can taste vibrant colour again, the memories of which fade more and more with every heartbeat spent in greyscale.

Her world crumbled to dust and ash long before the fires had churned it from the ground and the rubble they had once lived their lives in. Each morning she relives the moment she had died, the moment she had closed her eyes to shield them from the stark, blinding, far-off blast that signalled the end of everything she had known.

When she had opened them again, she had panicked, she had thought that somehow they had burned and seared the sight from her. It had taken a moment or two to realise it was her soul those bombs had destroyed, not her eyes.

He had died then. In the blink of an eye, her world had been reduced to black and white and grey. Dull and humourless and grim.  

For some time, she had wondered if she had died with him, in that blast, and woken in some Hell. But she knows better now. The living walk in a dead world. She walks in a dark one. They survive. They dream. They pray. They survive. For the fact that they shouldn’t. For the ones that they’ve lost. For spite. For rebellion. For defiance. For dreams. For love. For hope. They _survive._

****


	2. Part 2 - The Ashes

_Part 2 – The Ashes_

Picking listlessly at the tinned pears in her lap that are this evening’s only dinner, since they’ve found themselves running low on supplies again, she reflexively glances down at her watch, remembering too late that it no longer works and berates herself for the mistake, which is one she’s made at least twice in this last hour alone.

Little habits from before still cling to her, even so many months on, the way stubborn barnacles stick to the underside of a boat that never seems to realise  it’s sailing further and further from a home it’s never going to see again.

Sighing, she tries to interest herself in the pears again, after a brief flurry of thought that carries her from wondering why she doesn’t just get rid of the useless thing, to remembering that it’s his, and that’s why she can’t; habits are things she wants to lose, to leave in the past where they belong, but she can’t bring herself to let go of him so easily.

Worry gnaws away at her like a tide steadily and tirelessly eroding the chalk cliff it keeps crashing against, on and on and on, bit by bit by bit, wearing her patience so thin she’s so on edge and stretched so taut she’s like to split along her worn seams and snap at the slightest provocation.

She doesn’t need a working watch methodically counting out seconds, minutes and hours to know that Raven’s been gone too long. Cursing, she thinks irritably that she should have sent someone after her, if not to bring her back, at the very least to make sure she wasn’t alone. Being alone now is more dangerous than almost anything else. You can’t survive alone any more. Any more than you can trust people. A catch twenty two that frustrates the life out of her, as everything else seems to be doing today.

Resisting the urge to prowl irritably around the little camp again, as though the answer to all of her problems will present itself to her under an angrily kicked stone, as she’s already done six or seven times in Raven’s absence until Octavia had finally lost patience with her and steered her firmly into her tent, forced some food on her, and warned her not to come out again until it was finished, even if it seemed like the world was ending all over again.

Allowing herself a small smile at the memory of her fierce insistence, she busies herself with the pear tin again, though not its contents, which she’s long since given up on, tempting though the slimy things are. The tip of her index finger lightly traces the brand name as she tries to bring to mind the colour of the label; yellow, she thinks, but it as easily have been green, or maybe blue...

Her fruitless, wandering musings are interrupted by a shout and a sudden, uncharacteristic commotion from outside. Gratefully abandoning her meal, she exits her tent to investigate only to find her little group standing, hackles raised, facing Raven who’s being supported by a stranger decked out in black.

Heart contracting painfully in sudden fear, she crosses over to them in three quick strides, sliding between Lincoln and Octavia and wordlessly pressing the gun in Bellamy’s hands down to his side until she’s sure what they’re dealing with, indicating him forwards to help Raven instead, defusing some of the tension crackling through the taut air.

The stranger releases her, carefully, at once into Bellamy’s arms without a word or protest. Though she looks a little pale and ruffled, Abby doesn’t think she’s in need of any immediate attention and trusts Bellamy to look after her for the time being. She turns back therefore, to the stranger in their midst, studying him cautiously.

He looks to be about her own age, roughly half a foot taller, if she’s any judge, thick dark hair, and equally dark, unreadable eyes, deep and shifting, black and restless as an ocean tossed by a storm, leaving her wondering and wary, intrigued by him, yet tentative all the same.

Turning to Lincoln and Octavia, she makes a snap decision, that, while she doesn’t think Raven is in any great peril, she wants him to wait and stew just a little bit longer before she talks to him, and instructs firmly, “Keep him here while I check on Raven. Don’t let him out of your sight.”

She wants to be completely sure that Raven isn’t badly injured and she wants to hear from her what happened so she has something to back her before she speaks to their uninvited guest and tries to wrestle some answers from those unyielding eyes.

Her eyes meet his again for a fleeting moment, no more than a second, as she turns to walk away and something catches and stirs inside her at that look but, unable to make sense of it right now, she pushes it away in favour of focusing on the task at hand.

Ducking into the little shelter Bellamy had led Raven to, she finds her propped up on a bench, simultaneously examining the coils and joints on the prosthetic leg that she had built to replace the limb she had lost, and trying to fend Bellamy off as he fusses over her at the same time.

Abby moves over to examine the few cuts and bruises that pepper Raven’s skin, and then the older wound, the stump of the leg she herself had removed months ago when the damage it had suffered during the blasts had been too great for her to hope to save it.

Nothing gives her any great cause for concern and, stepping back to give her the space she always wants, she crosses her arms over her chest and asks instead, “What happened?” She tries to keep the bite of anger from her tone but it creeps in anyway, dragged into play by the fear and concern that has plagued her all day.

Raven meets her gaze, her eyes large and bright and hopeful despite the horrors they’ve witnessed and shifts slightly in her seat before she says, “I don’t really know.” Pausing a moment, she screws up her face in concentration, trying to piece everything together in her head, then, “I went foraging, not far,” she adds quickly, catching the look on Abby’s face and correctly interpreting it as a flash of frustration, “But I know this place...Well, I knew it,” she amends, “I thought there might be supplies nearby, since we’re running pretty low again,” grimacing darkly, she shakes her head, going on to say, “I just found an armed camp, swarming with them.”

Bellamy curses and begins asking for details, numbers and layout and movements, but she stops him with a quick look. An armed camp teeming with Synths nearby is one thing but they have a more pressing issue outside that needs attending to first.

She motions Raven to go on, “I watched them for a little while,” She remembers, “To see what they were doing, but a group started heading my way so I had to get out of there, only,” She glowers darkly at her leg in frustration, “Something got jammed up, I fell, I couldn’t move and I panicked. They were almost on me and I thought I was done for, I cried out for someone to help me.” She shivers slightly and Bellamy starts slowly rubbing her back as she goes on, “That was when tall, dark and death-wish heroics turned up,” She jerks her head back outside towards the place she’d returned, where Lincoln and Octavia are standing guard over her apparent saviour, “He helped me up and supported me so I could get out of there. I told him we had a camp nearby and-“

Breaking off there, she looks suddenly stricken and alarmed. Reading the look and the fear correctly, Abby gives her shoulder a soft, reassuring squeeze, insisting quietly, “No, you did the right thing, Raven.”

She nods and meets her eyes again as she says quietly, “He saved my life, Abby. And he risked his own to do it, with them so close.”

Doubt gnaws at her then but she doesn’t share her fears with Raven or Bellamy. The risk would have been minimal to him if he was one of them himself... It’s too hard to tell and too easy to trust and she’s paid too dearly in blood and grief in the past to ever make that same mistake again.

Giving Raven’s arm a gentle squeeze, she moves outside again to rejoin Octavia and Lincoln, who breaks away to meet her in the middle and murmur quietly that, “He wants to stay with us.”

Always a man of few words, which normally she values and is grateful for, that small, seemingly innocuous sentence sends a trickles of fear crawling down her spine like ice water, frozen and harsh, doubling the uncertainties that had begun plaguing her as she listened to Raven’s story.

Reluctantly, their body language spelling caution in every beat, Lincoln and Octavia leave her alone with him when she asks them to give her a minute with him. They’ve already relieved him of the weapons he was carrying, a surprising number, more befitting a whole group than one man, and though they’re none too happy about it, they withdraw, giving her an open plane of space with just the two of them in it.

They stare at each other for a long moment, two feral wolves circling and baiting and watching and waiting for the other to make the first move, to make a mistake, to give them a reason to go on the offensive, silently studying and judging, staring into one another’s eyes.

He seems remarkably cool and composed given the situation and the hostile environment he’s walked into. His stance and his eyes are guarded, as she’d made note of earlier, but he still seems relaxed enough to have an air of unconcern about him, as though he doesn’t care what happens to him next, or what they decide to do with him.

And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he lost the past of himself that made him care when the bombs went off; maybe he has nothing left to lose but his life, and without what he had, that doesn’t seem to matter as much as it used to. Maybe he’s tired of fighting and tired of scraping, tired of fear and paranoia and mistrust and dreams that are so much sweeter than life. Maybe he’s tired of _living_. She could understand that.

Or maybe they just never programmed him to care in the first place.

Lost in thoughts, she finds herself meeting his eyes again and feeling something lock and pulse in her stomach when their gazes connect. There’s an indescribable _pull_ to him; his own kind of gravity, tuned in to some deep half-forgotten, little understood instinct that draws her to him, even against her better judgement and mistrust, this new age has bred in her doubt-filled heart.

Fighting that back, she makes the first move, taking a small, measured step towards him and watching him as he follows her movements. His eyes, somehow both too empty, hollowed and deadened, a shell where a soul once was, like her own; but too full, full of grief and loss, and pain, and a hundred lifetimes crammed into one, like hers, haunted by cold and death and darkness, dreaming of life and warmth and life, like hers...

Giving herself a little shake, she forces back a modicum of composure and focus and catches him trying to do the same.

“Why?” She asks him, cold and curt and direct. He just stares at her in mute confusion, so she adds a little more to her demand to try and get a response from him, “Why did you help her?”

He considers this for a long moment, gazing into her eyes as though seeing something there that he had missed before, seeming genuinely bemused by her question, “Wouldn’t you?” He murmurs, turning it back on her instead of answering the question himself, “Wouldn’t you have helped her if you’d heard her cry out?”

Irritation prickles through her at his evasion, “We’re not talking about me.” She reminds him flatly, “What I would or would not have done is irrelevant. I’m asking _you._ ”

“I know what I did.” He replies sleekly, his tone infuriating, “So do you.”

Hot, red anger blazes through her, shockingly strong, at his words. She hasn’t felt anger like that in so long, hasn’t felt _anything_ like that in so long, has barely felt at all since Jake’s death, that this sudden, fleeting pulse tears through her veins like wildfire and threatens to overwhelm her. 

Every inch of it she directs at him, eyes flashing as she takes a threatening step closer to him and snarls, voice dangerously soft, “I know _what_ you did.” He seems somewhat taken aback by this sudden flood of aggression, that even she is struggling to understand, “I want to know _why_ you did it.”

“Look,” He begins, taking a step closer to her and making the distance between them practically non-existent in the process, “I don’t know what’s happened to you, what you’ve been through that’s broken you like this-“

 _Broken_. The word stings and she flinches at it as though he’d slapped her. But then, maybe he’s right, maybe she is, maybe they all are and that’s the only reason they’re still alive, their sharp cracked and splintered edges all that keep them safe. Maybe she can’t trust someone who hasn’t been broken by what they’ve been through and the weight of living that threatens to grow too heavy to bear each day.

“But I haven’t lost my humanity to the point that I would just ignore a terrified girl and leave her to her fate or use it to my advantage.” He growls flatly at her, his eyes blazing.

“Wouldn’t you?” She spits back at him, smothering the soft heart that empathises with his words, the soft heart that got Jake killed, the soft heart that still, somehow, hasn’t hardened enough to make any of this easy. “I don’t know anything about you.”

“You know I saved her.” He snaps back.

“I still don’t know why.” She snarls back at him, dislike mounting in her with every word he speaks.

“It was the right thing to do.” He replies, his voice suddenly dropping, low and quiet.

Wavering for a moment, she finally makes herself say, “That’s not an answer.”

His temper flares up again at that, “It’s all I’ve got. If you’re waiting for me to divulge some sort of ulterior motive here, I’m sorry to disappoint, but just because you think-“ He breaks off in hopeless frustration at first then in sudden comprehension, catching something, some flicker of truth in her eyes that betrays her, “You think I’m one of them, don’t you.” He murmurs quietly, looking straight into her eyes, his gaze sharp and steely, cutting to the quick, his words a clear statement, not a question.

She doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t need to, they both know he’s right.

“Kill me then.” He snaps harshly, glaring down at her, “Skip the interrogation, get it over with.”

If he’s trying to bait her or call her bluff he’s doing it so well she believes he genuinely means what he’s said.

Shaking her head, her stomach contracting into a tight, hard knot just at the idea, she forces her voice to remain cool and even when she replies, “That call isn’t mine to make alone. Stay here.” She commands firmly, turning on her heel and motioning Octavia and Lincoln to follow her as she returns to Raven and Bellamy.

Bellamy is the first to break the rotten ice, crossing his arms over his chest and asking bluntly, “Do you think he’s one of them?”

“I don’t know.” She replies honestly, shaking her head and grimacing, “He’s a jackass.” She scowls irritably, “And I don’t like him much, but that’s neither here nor there when it comes to deciding what to do with him.”

Glancing around her little group in appeal, she waits for someone to offer an opinion or a solution to their current predicament, anything.

Octavia speaks up first, disrupting the silence left in the wake of her words, “He said he wanted to join us; that we seem like good people, a good group.”

Bellamy snorts and snarls darkly at that suggestion, clearly not in support of letting him stay with them, which Abby finds herself leaning towards as well.

Raven elbows him in the side from her perch on the bench beside him and points out, “He saved my life, Bell, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him, I’d be out there, with them, probably with a bullet between my eyes.”  

“That doesn’t mean we can trust him.” Bellamy argues back stubbornly.

“Why didn’t he just kill me, if he was one of them?” She shoots at him, twisting around so she can glare more effectively up at him.

“Maybe he just wanted you to lead him back to your group, see how many we were, and where.” Bellamy answers at once without missing a beat.

“Well he’s done that,” Octavia puts in fairly, “Why ask to stay if he just wants to take us out? There are only five of us, and there’s a big group of them not far from here, we wouldn’t give them any trouble if he told us we were here and they wanted to get rid of us.”

“I don’t know, O, maybe he wants to spy on us, see if we lead him to a bigger group of people, or maybe he’s just looking to loot our supplies and kill us in our sleep-“ Bellamy says, rounding on his sister now.

Both Raven and Octavia start speaking at once, making it impossible to pull a point from the rabble that follows. In the end, Lincoln puts an end to the bickering, turning to Abby and stating pointedly, “We’re not willing to kill him in cold blood are we?”

“No.” She answers firmly and immediately, shuddering slightly that the thought, thinking that if they ever reach that point, where they’re willing to kill a stranger out of hand, just to ensure they survive the night, that none of them will deserve to survive any more.

Lincoln nods, having anticipated that answer, which none of them seem keen to argue against, “It’s too dangerous to just let him go.” He goes on steadily, looking around at each of them in turn as he speaks, “He could bring them down on us, if he is one of them, and even if he’s not, people aren’t the same any more, none of them. We’ve all had to do things, things we never thought we could bring ourselves to do, just to live, things no-one should ever have to do, for any reason. That changes you. And it makes it easier to keep doing unspeakable, unthinkable things because you’ve come too far now to stop or draw a line.”

 He pauses a moment to let that sink in then says quietly, “So he has to stay. For a while at least, where we can keep an eye on him, until we can be sure, one way or the other.”

The others nod, slowly to begin with, then more certainly, one by one falling into line with this new suggestion and reasoning, making noises of agreement and Abby finds herself nodding and agreeing with them, even though she might not like it, “Then it’s decided.” She says quietly, “He stays.”

Stepping away from the others, she moves back towards him, Lincoln’s words echoing around in her head. They have changed, all of them, she knows it. At the beginning, before she realised how bad things were, what they were facing, what they were up against, how few of them were left alive, she had insisted to herself that she wouldn’t let it shape her or define her or alter who she was and what she stood for.

The bombs could take her home, her friends, her husband, her life, her _world_ , but they couldn’t take her hope, her humanity, any part of her, unless she let them.

But she’d let them. Over and over and over again she’d let them, she’d let this, this dark, grey, miserable world that so reluctantly harbours her, chip away at her, bit by bit, piece by piece, eroding away who she was, stripping away her hope and her trust. Until she was as she is now, hollow and changed forever. That was what she’d done to survive; she hadn’t been forced to kill someone, to make an impossible decision between her loved ones and the greater good, she hadn’t done anything immoral and unforgivable, she had just failed to keep her promise, she had just lost herself in all the chaos.

Before she would never have been so suspicious. Before she would have smiled in relief when he showed up with Raven. Before she would have thanked him, invited him to stay, whether he had asked or not, she would have insisted, the least she could do for all he had done.

This wasn’t ‘before’ though, this was now, now when the world wants her and everyone she loves dead. They can’t go back, they can never have that life again, the luxuries that came with it, the luxury of trust, the luxury of certainty, the luxury of life itself.

They had to change, they had to adapt just to exist. And she’ll give this world everything she has, everything she is, everything she was, everything she still could be, if that’s the price that she has to pay to keep her people safe, then she’ll pay it, over and over again until there’s nothing left of her but dust and ash and faded memory.

Reaching him, she draws herself up and says brusquely, “You can stay with us, for now.” Cutting flatly across him when he opens his mouth to answer back, she goes on, her voice lowering, a dangerous edge splitting her words, “But I want you to listen to me very carefully,” moving in until she’s almost offensively close to him, she snarls, “These are my people, my responsibility. You’re neither. If you hurt them, if you threaten them, if you put them in any danger whatsoever, I will make the end of the world look like a pleasant daydream to you. Do you understand me?”

“Yes ma’am.” He replies in a tone that makes black fury twist like thunder in her stomach and she glares furiously at him,

“And another thing,” She spits viciously at him, “Stay away from me.”

****


	3. Part 3 - Watching The Watchman

_Part 3 – Watching The Watchman_

Sleep rarely comes easily to her any more, however much she wants to sink into the sweeter chaos of dreams, where she actually feels like she might be living, where there’s more than smoke and ash behind her eyes.

But there’s always too much in her head, too many fears, too many problems, too many concerns. Their supplies are running slow, they’ll be out of food in four days, three days, two, that wound looks like it’s getting infected, they ran out of antibiotics months ago, what they will face tomorrow, what they might face tomorrow, what they never will face but the thought still keeps her awake at night.

Tonight proves to be no different. But for once, it isn’t food that haunts her nightmares, or the AIs that caused all this, that still stalk through the smoke and flames, searching, hunting, making sport of the few that survived.

Tonight, her thoughts are consumed by the face of the man that walked into their camp with Raven under one arm and a darkness twisting behind his eyes. She would have dwelled on his name as well, no doubt, but she realised a few hours after she’d finished with him that she’d never asked it, and he’d never given it to him, any more than she had given him hers. Names are one of the few things they have left that can really be theirs anymore, an anchor to the past, to themselves. Things like that quickly become precious when you have little else left.

Giving up, she pushes herself up, stretching and wincing as a bone in her lower back cracks sharply and so loudly she’s almost surprised when it doesn’t wake anyone else. Padding outside she stops, struck by the sight that greets her. Everyone else has retreated to their shelters for the night to get some sleep, everyone except him.

He’s sitting staring into the depths of a large, dancing, crackling fire, that’s spitting up white hot sparks every now and then and casting strange, flickering shadows across the camp. When he hears her stirring opposite him, he looks up, the firelight playing strange tricks on his eyes, making them first inky black all over when they’re thrown into deep shadow and then flashing gold when the firelight catches them the right way. _Gold._

Starting forwards in shock she stares again, harder before giving herself a little shake, trying to insist she’s just tired, sleep deprived, seeing things. A similar look of surprise has flashed across his features but he’s quicker at smoothing them over than she is. A part of her wants to go to him, to demand what just happened, what he’s doing here, what all of this means, but she stops herself, insisting that it’s nothing, that it was a moment of madness.

Turning, she’s about to duck back inside her tent, with one more thing she needs to somehow forget before she can get any rest, but the sound of his voice over the cracking of the fire makes her stop, “Can’t sleep?”

Looking back round, catching herself trying to find that spark of light in his eyes again, but failing this time, she stares hard at him for a long time before finally she acquiesces enough to stiffly shake her head and say tautly, “No.” Taking a step closer to the fire, and to him, she adds, “I take it you can’t either?”

A wry smile is wrung from his lips then and he lowers his eyes a moment, shaking his head and, “No, no I can’t.” He considers for a moment and then adds reasonably, “Though that’s not really a new thing, for me.”

“No,” She says, finding herself, against her better judgement, taking yet another step closer to him until she’s standing just above where he sits beside his fire, “Not for me either.” She confesses, without really knowing why.

She doesn’t like to talk about before, not if she can help it, none of them do. They all know it doesn’t help, it doesn’t do anything for them. But she’d known them before, at least in part, she knows nothing about this man, who he is now, or who he was before, too many mysteries contained within one person, and he can say the same about her. Though that still doesn’t explain why she would tell him this. It’s not much of a revelation, merely an empathising of something he put forth himself, it doesn’t really tell him anything about her, or her anything about him, but she feels as though it connects them all the same.

The way he’s looking at her now, the same way he’d looked at her before, when the firelight danced in his eyes and made her jump the way she had, is making something in her tighten and squirm and pulse, it’s making something she’d thought long dead come back to life again and she doesn’t want it to, she’s not ready for it, whatever it is, and she’s not even sure of that, she just knows she doesn’t want it, she has enough to deal with, she doesn’t need this as well.

Dropping down beside him she looks up at him, her voice suddenly sharp, regretting her moment of weakness or softness or something and looking to stamp it out quickly before it takes root and bears the same poisoned fruit she fed to Jake.

“I want to ask you some questions.” She tells him, maybe a little more harshly than the situation called for as she tries to regain her composure and control over things, namely herself.

He shrugs, apparently unconcerned by this, “Ask away. I have nothing better to do.”

“Where is your group?” She asks him starkly, deciding not to waste any time while he seems to be co-operating somewhat with her.

That’s one of the things that’s been turning over and over in her head all evening, where he came from, who he came with, wondering if there are more of his people, if he’s vetting her band to see if it’s worth joining them together; or if they’re weak enough for his group to steal from. It wouldn’t be the first they’ve seen, people preying on other people, survival of the fittest at its most basic, stripping away morals and reservations and compassions the way the bombs stripped life from the earth.

“I don’t have one.” He tells her quietly, averting his eyes, staring into the fire again.

Irritated by this evasion, she glowers, dislike rippling through her again, her tone decidedly less warm as she amends her question slightly to one he won’t be so easily able to dodge, “What happened to them?”

Meeting her eyes again before he speaks, he shakes his head then murmurs softly, “I never had one.”

That catches her off-guard and instantly makes her wary and suspicious, “Impossible.” She whispers, her words more than an accusation, “No-one can survive alone anymore.”

“Then I must be a figment of your imagination.” He snarls back at her, his eyes flashing angrily in her direction as his head snaps back up to glare at her, “I’m getting tired of you mistrusting every word that comes out of my mouth-“

“You haven’t given me any reason to trust you yet.” She reminds him coolly, keeping her expression neutral and her eyes guarded, not letting herself slip into anger as easily as he has.

“I haven’t given you any reason to distrust me, either.” He points out irritably.

“Trust is earned.” She murmurs stubbornly, refusing to look away from him or to back down on this.

Sighing, the anger seems to flood out of him as quickly as it had come, “Fine.” He murmurs, shaking his head, “I can’t make you trust me, and I can’t make you believe me either, I can only tell you the truth and wait for you to figure out that it’s not a lie.” Glancing across to see if that’s swayed her, he asserts again, “And the truth is that I don’t have a group with me, I never did.” Pausing, he takes several breaths and several attempts, staring fixedly at his hands, twisting in his lap, as though they’re marked, all the while, before he manages to get out, “I was alone when the bombs went off. I knew no-one in the city would have made it, I...Made it away, made it alone.”

“This whole time?” She asks, still disbelieving, the five of them have barely made it together, and barely kept themselves together at that, alone...

“Mostly.” He admits, favouring her with a fleeting glance before he says, “There was a group I tried to join, a few weeks after it all happened but they...They weren’t good people.” Meeting her eyes, something stirs in the depths of his as he says softly, “This,” He gestures vaguely around him, “The bombs, the war, _them_ -“ He pauses a moment, weighing his words, “They bring out the worst in people, in all of us. People who were already bad got worse, until they could barely be considered human anymore. What they want they take, by force, and they kill because they can, because it’s one less thing to worry about, one less person taking up space, breathing their dirty air, eating their food, daring to exist.”

Leaning back a little he goes on, and she finds herself drawn in, listening. There’s a hypnotic quality to his voice, to the way he weaves words, that she can’t help but be drawn in to, “Good people...”

“I don’t think there are any truly good people anymore.” She finds herself whispering to the fire, her words snatched up in the smoke that swirls around them.

“No.” He agrees faintly, “No, they’ve had to do too many things, things they shouldn’t have had to, things they shouldn’t have even had to dream of, but they’ve done them.” Shifting slightly, his voice becomes a little louder as he goes on, getting them back on topic, “After that first group I kept my distance. People are nearly as them now, the wrong people. I watched you and your group for a while, I was still trying to decide whether to approach you or not when Raven inadvertently made my choice for me.”

Finding herself drawn back into the conversation she decides to drop the question of companions for the moment and changes tact instead, “Where were you from?”

“Does it matter anymore?” He demands scathingly, a definite note of sarcasm in his voice as he observes drily that, “We all seem to be in some Hell now.”

“It matters because I asked and I wanted you to answer.” She snaps back at him, finding that, as easily as she’s drawn in to him, it’s just as easy for her to lose all patience with him and for her frustrations to start bubbling up once more.

 Something about him unsettles her, he gets under her skin, he gets into her head and he makes her feel something again, so much, that she hasn’t felt for so long, that it’s almost always overwhelming, and she hates him for that, almost as much as she longs for him to keep doing it.

“Carolina.” He tosses out finally, giving in to her.

Watching him for a long moment, she asks her next question, her voice low and faint, easy to miss if they weren’t sitting so close and in almost absolute silence otherwise, “What have you done to survive?”

The look he gives her is empty and unreadable, and somehow more threatening for that before he murmurs softly, “The same as you.” He tells her, his eyes never leaving hers, “What I’ve had to.”

“You don’t know anything about me.” She hisses back at him, the softness of the last few moments utterly forgotten in the irritation that flares up in her at his words, at his presumption.

“I know you’re alive.” He counters, smooth as silk, his tone still measured and even, his voice controlled, “I know you’ve made sure the other people in your group have made it as well. Now, with things the way they are, that takes something.” He blinks slowly, studying her and she finds her words stuck in her throat, allowing him to go on.

 “I know you’re smart, resourceful, determined and principled. If you weren’t you wouldn’t have made it this far, and not with your humanity, your morals intact, humanity and morals that stopped you killing a complete stranger, a potential threat, in cold blood.” He gestures faintly towards himself as he says this, “I know you’re a leader,” he continues, eyeing her a moment before he adds, a little too knowingly, “A reluctant one?”

“It’s not like that.” She tries to tell him, feeling a little flustered by this dressing down of her character, “We have a democracy here.”

A faint smile dares to quirk at the corner’s of his lips at that , “Your idea?” He shoots at her and she feels a red hot flush creep into her cheeks and hopes he can’t see in the dim light and the shadows cast by the fire in front of them.  

From the look on his face as he ploughs on however, she’s sure he’s noticed; or that he already knew and didn’t need her response as confirmation, “You’re respected in this group, cool under pressure, they look to you in a crisis, you’re loved.” He waits a beat, seeming to consider his next words before he murmurs them quietly anyway, “But you’ve suffered.”

Her head jerks up a little too fast at that and her eyes flash warning across the foot of empty space between them, “Who hasn’t?” She snaps, more harshly than she’d meant to, at him.

Studying her with guarded eyes he murmurs softly, “You lost someone.”

Her fingers automatically brush the watch at her wrist; Jake’s watch. Then she berates herself, anger rising in her and she looks away from him, not wanting to share her pain and her grief with this man, not wanting him to see it in her eyes, not wanting him to be able to use it, not wanting him to know her, wanting nothing to do with him at all.

“The world ended.” She growls irritably, dragging her hand forcefully away from the only thing she has left of the man she loved and snapping at the ground, closing her eyes and swallowing the grief that’s risen up in her chest all over again, “We all lost something.”

Not waiting for whatever reaction he makes to that, she snaps another brisk, brusque question at him to steer them out of these waters she has no intention of ever going through again, “What did you do before?”

“My job?” He clarifies, raising his eyebrows at her. She nods sharply and he shifts into a more comfortable position before he tosses out easily, “Don’t take all the fun out of me.” She glares at him and he suggests blithely, “You could guess? I promise to tell you if you’re right.”

“I’m not interested in playing games with you.” She tells him coldly, glaring darkly in his general direction.

“No?” He pushes in exaggerated disappointment, widening his eyes at her.

Glowering in disgust and deciding she’s had more than she can stomach of his conversation and of him for one night, she pushes herself to her feet, deciding it’ll be better to lie restless and awake in her tent than it will be to spend another minute in his presence.

As she moves to brush irritably past him, he reaches out and lightly catches her wrist between his fingers. It’s a light gesture, almost gentle, definitely non-threatening, but it’s as though his touch sends a bolt of lightning bursting up her veins from the point that he makes contact. Colour blazes bold and blinding in front of her eyes, the fire roars in dark, blood red and sweet yellow gold and deep autumn orange for an instant before she pulls away from him, breathing as though she’s just run for a day and a night trying to outrun the demons that stalk her dreams, brought forth to torment her.

Staring at him strangely, almost accusingly, as though expecting him to offer up an explanation for what just happened but he seems as shocked and taken aback and as affected by what’s just happened as she does.

Finally, he manages to stammer out a soft, “Sorry.” Her tongue sticks and she doesn’t answer him, she just keeps staring at him, trying to understand what’s happening between them but utterly unable to make sense of any of it.

As though trying to bring the conversation, and the world, back to a plane they can both comprehend, and also calm her and mollify her somewhat he says quietly, “I was a cop.” She blinks at him, his words not quite clicking into place with her for a moment, “Before,” He adds, still watching her, “That’s what I did.”

Nodding, she turns, stumbling a few steps back in the general direction of her tent then she stops and turns again and asks quietly, “What’s your name?”

“Marcus Kane.” He answers her at once and up front this time, then adds in a strange tone, “Maybe that should have been your first question, Abby.” He puts a delicate emphasis on her name and a shiver goes through her spine at the same time her stomach clenches in a mixture of anger and something that feels almost like guilt. She starts towards him but he raises his hands in a gesture of surrender and shrugs, “You’re not the only one who likes to know what they’re dealing with.”

Turning on her heel decisively this time, she returns to her tent, silently seething and still a little confused by what she experienced with him this evening. Deciding to put it down to sleep deprivation, and the stresses of the day, which had led to her not eating as much as she should have done, she crawls back beneath her thin blankets and waits for sleep to take her and carry her off somewhere Marcus Kane won’t plague every thought that drifts through her head.

****


	4. Part 4 - Wildfire

_Part 4 – Wildfire_

Anger blazes through her red hot and untameable and once again she finds herself directing all of her fury directly at him. They’re standing only a few feet apart but yelling at each other as though miles separate them. Her hands are balled into fists and she can feel her fury and frustration at him burning inside her, threatening to split her along all of her fraying seams.

He always does this to her, always. It doesn’t matter what’s going on between them, everything feels heightened and strengthened to a point where she can barely take it, every interaction, every touch, every look, every emotion screaming at a pitch that drowns everything else out, that makes every other dull sensation she’s been experiencing for months seem like a faint and distant memory.

It’s an effect that she relishes and despises all at once. Relishes because it’s been so long since she properly felt anything and having him inspire this, inspire _something_ in her at last is the sweetest thing she’s tasted in so long because it doesn’t taste of ashes and grief. But she hates it because it’s _him_ because after all this time, he’s the one to make her feel something and she doesn’t want anything to do with him, she doesn’t trust him, she doesn’t like him, she doesn’t want him near her. But she can’t stop herself being drawn to him for all that.

After the incident by the fireside, she had done her best to keep her distance from him, avoiding him wherever and whenever she could. For the most part he had seemed to be of the same mind as her and had respected the very firm boundaries she had erected against him and had even reinforced them with a few of his own. 

It hadn’t stopped them clashing again though. Doing that seems to require something that neither of them possess. Like trying to tame a wildfire blazing through a forest, like trying to turn a tide or tame an ocean or stop a nuclear blast from destroying everything you love with a scream and a desperate prayer, it’s impossible. They run too hot and fight too hard and it’s always just simmering below the surface these days, waiting to get the better of both of them. And she lets it. Every time she lets it.

This morning had started the same as most other mornings this week. They had woken early, she had skirted around him, busied herself with talking to Raven and working her through some of the physio exercises she was insisting she keep at every day. The trouble had come when they had packed up and started to move on and the argument that still raged between them had come of that.

So far they had consistently been keeping to the roads. It stopped them getting accidentally turned around and lost and confused in the thick forests that surrounded them, it helped them stumble across stores and shops they could root through for more supplies to keep them going and there was something oppressive and foreboding about the woods around them she didn’t like. It would be too easy for them, or for other people, who weren’t coping with the end of the world as well as they might be to lie in wait for the weak and unwary and she knew her little group wouldn’t be able to survive something like that.

As soon as she’d set off to move down away from the sheltered space on the fringes of the forest they had slept that night and head back down towards the road that ran parallel to them down below however, he had caught her and pulled her back, shaking his head and telling her they couldn’t go that way, they had to stick to the forest.

Wrenching away from him, suspicion had immediately started twisting in her gut. True, he hadn’t done anything in the last few weeks to confirm that there was something untrustworthy about him, that he was anything other than he said he was. But he was clever and cunning and the way he’d consistently tried to turn every situation she’d put him in and every conversation she’d had with him to his advantage and use it to try and find things out about her in turn still stuck with her and made her wary. So this sudden and aggressive insistence that they do things any other way than what she was suggesting; a way she already had reason to dislike, instantly brought her hackles up.

He know she doesn’t trust him, knows that she thinks he’s lying, still thinks that he means harm to her and the people she’s so carefully guarded and brought through this mess at her own expense. It’s not hard to understand her position, given the circumstances that they’re currently living in. People splintered off into little groups of their own, banding together for survival and protection. After that, everyone who wasn’t a friend, wasn’t part of the group, was instantly branded an enemy, a threat.

When the world collapsed around them, those first few weeks were Hell. This was the afterlife of the Earth and it wasn’t something anyone should have been made to live through. The bombs had gone off in a co-ordinated global attack, as far as he could tell. The small fragments of humanity that had somehow, stubbornly clung to life, the ones that hadn’t been evacuated to the space stations orbiting the planet, the miserable, unfortunate few that were stuck down here and were too stubborn or difficult or lucky to die the way they were supposed to had been hunted down.

The AIs humanity had created had chosen to stop working with them and start living without them. But that had created a host of problems in itself in that, the few that remained no longer knew who were people and who were synthetic. All they had to do was seed themselves among the groups that remained, integrate, suffer, survive, and then turn on them all. Those that survived that as well quickly learned not to trust newcomers.

He had known that was a risk he was taking, trying to join this group. Before he had made any attempt he had spent some time watching them, trying to get the measure of them. Everything had been accelerated when he’d come upon Raven terrified and in danger in the woods that day, but he had known he was gambolling with his life and their morality. But he’d also known that was a risk he would have to take. Things were getting worse and worse and it was becoming harder and harder to survive alone.

Now though, he wishes the world was a little less wary because he knows what waits for them if they keep walking along the road and he needs her to listen to him, but a lot of the time it feels as though her default setting is the opposite of whatever he thinks is a good idea. They’ve been yelling themselves hoarse at one another for the past ten minutes and she’s still not budging an inch.

“Why won’t you just _listen_?” He finds himself snarling at her, “What do you think is going to happen if we go my way?”

“I don’t know.” She shouts back, throwing her hands up and pitching away from him, “It could be a trap, it could-“

“A trap?” He repeats, cutting furiously across her and taking a step closer to her still, noting that she firmly stands her ground, not giving him an inch, “That’s what you think? That’s-“ He breaks off, shaking his head and trying to calm himself a little, to provide a rational response that might actually have half a chance at getting through to her, “Why would I do that, Abby?” He demands, using her name to try and bring her back in to him and calm her somewhat.

If anything, that boldness and the gall she reads in it to speak to her so intimately and personally and in a way she clearly doesn’t think he’s earned only serves to piss her off further, “Why _wouldn’t_ you?” She snarls at him, “If you really are on your own, if you really don’t have any allegiance to anything or anyone but yourself then what’s stopping you?”

“What have I ever done to make you think I mean you, any of you, any harm?” He counters angrily, “I saved Raven’s life, which is something you seem to conveniently forget-“

“I haven’t forgotten anything.” She tells him flatly, a modicum of reason entering her tone again, “And I’m grateful.” She goes on sincerely, “But that doesn’t mean that I trust you, Kane.” She growls coldly, “You could have used it as a way to gain my trust, it could all have been a ploy-“

He shakes his head, turning away from her in hopeless disgust, dragging his fingers through his hair in frustration, knowing she might have every reason to be wary, to decide not to trust him, but he needs her to, because if she keeps going like this she’s going to get them all killed.

“So you think everything about me is a lie? Everything I’ve told you is a lie? Everything that we-“ He breaks off, teetering on the edge of bringing up the moment they had shared beside the fire, the strange connection that seems to linger between them, that he can’t understand or explain but that he knows she feels too, but he knows that will only inflame the situation more, he can see that in her eyes now, so he stops and says, in a softer tone, “You think everything we’ve been through has been a lie?”

“No, no we haven’t been through _anything_ together, Kane.” She growls at him, “We haven’t suffered, we haven’t survived together, there is nothing tying us together.” She snarls at him, with an edge to her voice that implies she thinks if she says that firmly and angrily enough that someone will just make it so and stop everything they’ve been feeling since they met. “You don’t get to play that card. Not after three weeks. When the only thing you’ve done to try and show me that I should trust you is not slit our throats as we sleep.”

That outburst renders him silent for a long moment until he says quietly, “What do you want me to say, Abby?” He demands in a low voice, “What do you want me to do? Throw myself in front of a bullet for you? Or one of the group? Will that win your trust? Or will that just be a ploy as well?” She flounders, clearly flustered and doesn’t answer so he pushes a little harder, “Tell me.” He says, more sharply, “Tell me, Abby, what should I do? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? How do I make you trust me? Tell me, what do I-“

“I don’t know.” She snaps back at him, clearly wanting him to stop, “I don’t know what you have to do, I just know that as of now, what you’ve done and what you’ve said up to this point, none of it makes me trust you, none of it makes me want to listen to you on this.”

“Why?” He breathes, infuriated by trying not to let it show, “Why? I haven’t tried to change anything else, I haven’t tried to divert anything else, I’m just telling you that if you keep following the road, you’re going to hit a big group of them and you’re going to get all of us killed. Why you can’t just hear me out?”

“Because I don’t know you.” She shouts back at him, “I don’t know you, I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you’ve done, what you’re willing to do, what your boundaries are, where you draw lines, I don’t know anything about you, Kane.” Other than the fact that there’s something between them, something that connects them, something that draws her inexorably in to him, she knows that. But she’s forcing herself not to think about that. 

“You don’t know the area either.” He tells her flatly, deciding to stop trying to encourage her to trust him and instead hit her with facts that will make her listen to him, “The land starts to split here, the forest rises the road stays flat, which means if we continue on your path along the road it means we can be seen and attacked from miles away.” He sees what he thinks is a faint flicker of doubt in her eyes and plunges on, pressing this as long as he has her on edge at least, “We should stick to the high ground.” He insists, “We’re safer in the trees, it gives us some shelter, some protection.” Moving in another step closer and holding her gaze he hisses urgently, “And if you keep going along that road you’re going to walk straight into an armed base swarming with hundreds of them. They’ll kill all of us.” 

“We’ve stuck to the roads since the start.” She protests, glaring at him in evident, open suspicion, “We haven’t met any trouble, or-“

“That’s the point.” He snaps, struggling to keep his temper in check as he fights to make her listen to him and actually hear him, “They lull you into a false sense of security, they make you think the road is safe, that it’s a good option, it’s open, it’s familiar, it’s safe, that’s what they’re relying on. They know us. They know the way we work, the way we think, that’s how we made them.”

They stand staring at one another, trying to read the other’s thoughts in their eyes before they say anything. He still reads suspicion in her dark, deep eyes, that look almost molten in the early morning light, and for the briefest snatch of a second, almost gold. That distracts him for a moment and her voice has to jolt him back to the present when she shakes her head, exhaling hopelessly and taking a step back from him, turning away slightly and running her fingers through long, wild hair.

“I just, I still,” She shakes her head, struggling to get the words out until, with an air of forcing herself to do so, she says too quickly, “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you enough to risk the lives of everyone I care about, everyone I have in this world.”

“You care about this people.” He says quietly, a statement, looking quietly in her eyes as he speaks, “You want to keep them safe? Before anything else?”

“Yes, of course.” She says, a little flustered, and clearly a little more uncertain and unsettled for having heard his reasons.

Then _listen_ to me.” He urges her, a note of strained desperation in evidence in his tone now, “I want that too-“

“Why?” She counters, stepping in again, every defence slammed back up against him, as though she regrets her indecision and her momentary weakness and is now coming back at him in return with twice what she was putting up before, “Why do you care what happens to them? To me?”

Frustration and disgust well up inside him to the point where he can’t contain it any more. In a lot of ways, he understands her concern, understands her question. In the circumstances it’s probably fair, he hasn’t been with them that long and he’s already told her he came to them alone, with no prior allegiance but to himself and his own survival. She can’t know what he’s done, what he’s had to do, but she sees something in his eyes that makes her draw away and he can’t fault her for that either.

But none of that logic or reason or rationale hits him until later. On the spot and in the heat of the moment, all he has is what he knows, is the truth he keeps trying to tell her. That he does care about her people, he’s become fond of most of them in the few weeks they’ve travelled together, he’s talked with them, bonded with them, he’s invested in them.

It had been so long since he had heard another person’s voice, the sound of someone’s laughter that every word and every smile because another that he can’t lose again. He wants to protect them. He wants to help them. And he wants to help and protect her too. There’s something about this woman, something that she inspires in him that he hasn’t felt for years, something that he craves, as though she’s a drug that he keeps breathing deep into his lungs every time he so much as looks at her or hears her speak a word. That’s what he feels, that’s what’s real to him in this moment in time, the only thing that’s felt real or worth saving since the world ended around him and anger rears up in him at the fact that she can’t understand that, or at least even try to listen to him.

“What happened to you?” He breathes in a hoarse, furious whisper, bearing down on her while she stubbornly holds her ground, glaring right back up at him in turn, though he sees something falter in the depths of her eyes at his words , “What happened that broke you so badly that you look at everyone like they’re an enemy, like they’re trying to hurt you. What happened that made you lose all of your trust? What happened to you that made you lose your faith in humanity?”

A faint shiver goes through her at those words and her voice is hard and cold as steel tempered in a blizzard when she says quietly, “I haven’t.” The way she’s looking at him is making something within him unravel and fray slightly, “I still have faith in humanity, or I wouldn’t be bothering trying to survive, trying to find a place for us, trying to find hope.”

Sighing he nods, hanging his head and massaging his temples, looking up at her again before he says, “You just don’t have any faith in me, right?”

“Right.” She replies, quiet, but firm and steady, her gaze, to her credit, never faltering away from his.

Shaking his head and rubbing his eyes with his hands, struggling to think what to say next that might manage to sway her he finally says in a low voice, “You don’t like me.” He points out baldly, noting that, in keeping with his brutal honesty, she makes no attempt to shy away from that or soften his words with futile protestations, “I get that.” He tells her flatly, “But what I’m saying makes sense. You know that.” He murmurs tautly, “You don’t have to like me, you don’t even have to trust me. Just listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying.”

 She bites her lip and he moves in a little closer, reaching out to her in a moment of madness, wanting to touch her, to connect with her, to make her look at him and see the truth in his eyes, to understand him, the way he thinks she should, the way he thinks she can, before thinking better of it and snatching his fingers back at the last second, “You’ll never have faith in anyone if you never give them a chance.” He says quietly, “And if you never give anyone a chance, if you never trust anyone...You’ll start to go mad.”

Looking in his eyes for a long time before she finally swallows hard, draws herself up, takes a deep, rattling breath and says, with an edge of finality, “Alright.” She nods, “We’ll do this your way.” She relents at last, “But if this even starts to look like it’s all going to Hell...I’m throwing you to the wolves first.”

****


	5. Part 5 - The Wolves

_Part 5 – The Wolves_

His eyes are trained firmly on Abby, about ten feet to his left and then a little behind him, walking with Octavia and Lincoln, so he doesn’t notice Raven limping up next to him until she’s right beside him, glowering irritably at her leg, as though threatening it to dare jam on her again.

Glancing up at him, she follows where his gaze had been lingering a moment before then says, without so much as a preliminary  a ‘how are you?’ or even a ‘hello’, “You know, some of us are grateful you saved my ass.”

Bellamy wanders past on their other side and hears this and smirks at her, “And some of us really wonder why you bothered.” He quips drily as he wanders past, catching Raven’s eye and winking as he does so.

“ _Jackass_.” She mutters too quietly for him to hear, glaring off in his direction in a way that implies he’s going to pay for that comment at some later date. For now though, she refocuses herself on him and goes on, her voice a little softer and lower now, “She’s grateful too.” She says, nodding towards Abby, “There’s just a lot of pressure on her you know? I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her, most of us probably wouldn’t, and she just wants to keep us all safe and do the right thing. You just, confused things a bit, to the point where she didn’t know what the right thing _was,_ but she’s trying. Don’t think too badly of her.”

“No,” he says, his tone light, squinting down at Raven and giving her a hand as they both stumble over a tangle of roots hidden beneath their feet, “I think things are definitely improving, she’s warming to me, I can tell.” He tells her with cheery confidence.

She stares at him in a way that suggests she thinks he’s feverish and delusional and he grins and explains, “She only yelled for an hour this morning...Usually it’s at least three.”

That wrings a laugh out of Raven, which continues until Abby falls in step with them to join them. Raven melts away, raising her eyebrows significantly at him, dropping back to walk with Bellamy and giving him a well-deserved, sharp elbow to the ribs for his earlier cheek.

“You’re sure we’re going the right way?” She asks him bluntly when she’s sure she has his attention.

He nods simply and points up, “You can see the sun through the trees.” He explains carefully.

“I can see at lot more of it than I could an hour ago.” She puts in, watching him for a reaction, “They’re thinning out, you’re taking us back towards the fringes.”

Momentarily surprised by this assessment he doesn’t bother trying to deny it and instead offers her a reason, “I told you the ground started changing from here on in. We have the high ground in these trees, a vantage point, and the land below is flat, I want to use that and take stock of what’s going on down there. If anything is coming towards us, I want to be well warned.” Glancing around them and taking stock of the markedly slower pace than they’d been making before he adds, “Besides, we could use a break for twenty minutes or so, catch our breath a little.”

To his surprise, she doesn’t protest any of that, but simply offers him a jerky nod and continues to walk at his side, looking around her every now and then to take stock of the others, reassuring herself that they’re still close and still alright.

He studies her thoughtfully as they walk along in slightly tense silence. She’s been distinctly cooler to him since they set off, retreating to her previous tactic of keeping her distance from him, keeping him at arm’s length and generally seeming to pretend that he doesn’t exist. He still doesn’t know what to make of her, or how to feel about her. She’s a competent leader, and a good person, he thinks, but her stubbornness infuriates him and causes him to lose his temper far too easily, she finds it far too easy in general to push all of his buttons and get a reaction from him.

 And then there’s the strange _something_ that makes him feel like he’s connecting to her; almost as though he’d known her in another life and she’d been waiting for him to find her again in this one; but waiting too long. There’s something there, something between them, some magnetic pull that attaches him to her, and he knows that she’s just as aware of it as he is. But he still doesn’t want to bring it up, to see if the words sound as mad when said aloud as they do in his head and to have her shoot him down the way he’s sure she will, even if she does feel the same way he does.

Pushing that from his mind as the edges of the forest and the sharp drop-off that arches down towards the road becomes visible he tries to focus on the present and stops dead, motioning for the others to come in a little closer and move a little more slowly and quietly now they’re this close.

They should be safe up here, he knows, the angle of the incline is such that anyone looking up would have a hard time spotting them nestled here between the trees, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to make it easy for them.

Edging nearer, he and Abby move forwards together and he hears her gasp and feels the sharp intake of breath she takes beside him when they both spot the same thing, a large, heavily armed patrol marching up the hill on such a line that if they keep going in that direction at this rate, they’ll be on them in a matter of minutes.

Turning back, his brain snapping automatically into action, opening his mouth to round up the others and organize them so they can get out of here and find somewhere safe to shelter and hide that they won’t be found, he’s interrupted by a sharp pain in his left side, as something grabs onto him and sends him stumbling back against the trunk of the nearest tree, knocking the breath from his lungs and surprising him so much he barely has a chance to react or protest before the gun at his hip has been snatched away and directed at his chest, just over his heart.

It takes him a moment to register that it’s Abby. One hand on his chest, the other, trembling slightly, holding the gun, her eyes fixed on his and full of fury and rage. He can feel it in her, he can feel it in her touch, white hot and fuelled by dark red fury, he can see it in her eyes, and glinting in her eyes when she sun hits him the right way for a moment.

“Abby!” Someone shouts from behind them but she pays them no attention, and neither does he, both entirely fixed on the other, and no-one interferes.

“You said,” she whispers, cold, black anger etched in every syllable that she hurls at him, “You said this was safe, you said they would be safe, if we went your way, you said you could keep them safe.”

“I said that if we went along the road we would die, I never said-“ He begins slowly but she shakes her head violently at him, backing him up a little harder against the tree trunk, the muzzle of the gun pressed up hard against his shirt now so that he can feel the cold kiss of the metal.

“Don’t.” She snarls at him, trembling with the effort of trying to control herself, “Don’t do that. You, I did what you said, I didn’t trust you, I didn’t, but I did what you told me to because I thought that you meant it, I thought that you really wanted to help, that you really wanted them to be okay but-“

“Abby, Abby listen to me.” He whispered urgently, letting his eyes flicker over the top of her head, infinitely aware of the fact that they’re coming, that he doesn’t have time for this, none of them do. He raises his hands in a hopeless gesture of surrender, watching her eyes, “I had nothing to do with this.” He shakes his head, feeling her hands trembling against him, feeling pounding through both of them like a current, ripping and tugging and growing with every passing second until it’s almost unbearable, “I swear, Abby, I didn’t-“

His words are cut off by the violent explosion that rips through the taut air around them like a blade through silk, splintering the tree trunk just above his head making her scream as he ducks, grabbing her and roughly dragging her down with him to protect her.

More shots ring out around them. Chaos envelopes their little party. He hears frightened shrieks and panicked yells that seem to be coming from every direction. He’s disorientated and confused. His head is ringing, howling, pounding, blood thundering against his ears as though they’re being assaulted by a violent, vengeful ocean, crashing against him again and again.

Abby is pressed up against him, the gun still clenched tightly in her hand but she makes no protest or resistance when he eases it from her fingers to return fire. The few blasts he manages to get off with her huddling in against him, covering her noise from the racket erupting just above her, buys her a few moments to remember how to breathe and he fills his lungs with air and yells, “Run!” at them to get them moving, fumbling for Abby’s arm and pulling her to her feet and after him as he turns and pelts off into the trees, glancing over his shoulder every now and then to fire a shot in the direction of his pursuers, staring around him to see where the others are.

After a while though, that becomes impossible. Bullets fall like rain around them, killing wherever they fall. Grenades cause explosions to rip apart trees, sending splinters of wood in all directions, like fireworks with honed, sharpened edges, soon peppering his skin with a series of small cuts. Smoke canisters fly overhead and it’s soon all he can do just to keep going himself and pray that the others are coming after him, keeping him, alive. Any trip, any stumble will kill him, he knows that. His heart hammers in his throat. Between that and the thick white fog that surrounds them, it’s a wonder he can breathe. 

The world around them has been ripped apart and turned into a war zone. They’ve gone back months and months in time. The bombs are going off. The air is filled with smoke and flames and screams. His heart seems to beat in slow motion, marking time, telling him he’s overstaying his welcome in this body, on this planet. Fire burns around him, chewing up his lungs and ravaging his throat and skin. Pain showers down on him from above. He can hear the sounds of running footsteps, thundering all around him, running, praying, running, pleading, running, the same as him.

When he finally stumbles out of the thick choking mists of white smoke behind them he finds himself in a small clearing, doubled over, panting. One by one, the others fall in alongside and just behind him, all breathing hard, smeared with blood and dirt, fear reflected in all of their eyes, but they’re here, alive, alright, except...

“Where’s Abby?” Octavia demands, looking around them.

They all stare at one another, stricken, but not daring to call out for her and give away their position, each of them looking back into the thin, steadily dissipating fog in front of them, each thinking the same thing. That somewhere within that torn, scorched, churned span of earth they’ve all only just managed to escape, she’s stranded, alone, and defenceless.

He makes an impulsive decision on the spot, striding over towards Bellamy and shoving his pack into his hands, after relieving it of the extra rounds of ammo he has stored in the side pockets. Still slightly breathless from his headlong charge out of Hell, he manages to relay his instructions, quick, clear and concise, “Keeping heading in this direction,” He says, gesturing to make his point, “After about a half a mile you’ll come to a lake, on the East bank there’s a rocky incline, go up about three quarters of the way, you’ll find a cave, shelter there, you’ll be safe.”

He turns but Raven’s voice from behind him stops him, “Where are you going?”

“To find Abby.” He answers simply, “Wait for us in that cave we’ll find you.” Hesitating a moment, he steels himself and adds, “If we’re not back by morning...” he trails off, leaving the rest unsaid, knowing that they can all hear the implication in his tone and turns, striding back into the mists before he changes his mind or this fit of madness passes or someone tries to stop him.

Jogging back through the trees, darting here and there, weapon drawn and at his hip, he moves back the way they had come, searching for any sign of her. The smoke has thinned slightly and makes it a little easier to see, but even so, he doesn’t dare run the way every instinct welling up inside him is urging him to do. A part of him wonders why he’s doing this; the way it had wondered for a moment when he had automatically run towards Raven’s scream to try and help.

He has nothing left in this world; nothing; and more blood on his hands, more sins to atone for than he can manage in a lifetime. But Raven was a start, and this is a continuation. And something in him, in his gut, draws him to search for her, to find her, to protect her, to stop any harm from coming to her. Instinct drives him, as much as instinct tries to pull him back. But the one to find her, to search, to save, is stronger than the other and so he listens to that, and acts on that, pressing himself against the backs of trees every few feet, taking cover, taking stock, making sure he’s going in the right direction, and that he’s not running straight into an ambush which won’t help either of them.

Finally, after what feels like an age in the oppressive, fog-filled gloom that surrounds him, he hears a faint cry of pain and then alarm and swings around in the direction of it. His heart leaps into his mouth as he sees her. She’s stumbled and fallen, exactly what he’d been afraid of earlier, and has sprawled at the base of an ancient tree, its roots knotted and twisted beneath her, like a nest of coiling vipers.

One of them stands over her, light dusty blonde hair on its head, pale hands shaped and curved around a sleek black gun, such a good imitation of human that for a moment he pauses, forgetting himself for a moment, forgetting what it is, forgetting what he’s dealing with; human without any of the things that make it so. The faint half smile upon its lips as it contemplates the terror of the woman sprawled, panting, bleeding and breathless at its feet, is what reminds him, and the thing that kills the hesitation in him and makes him pull the trigger.

Abby gasps faintly, her eyes squeezing tight shut, recoiling away, as though she thinks the blast and the bullet were meant for her. A second later, she realises the truth and her eyes flutter open at the sound of his footsteps as he hurries towards her, kicking it out of the way and leaning down to offer her a hand to help her to her feet.

“We have to get out of here.” He urges her while she stares at the thing on the ground that was so intent on killing her only a second before when it held death in its hands and forced her to look into those cold black eyes and face it, “We have to move, come on, there will be more of them on the way, the sound of the shot will draw them.” He presses her, noting the glassy look in her eyes, unable to draw her eyes away from the thick black liquid that seeps from the wound like blood, “Abby.” He says sharply, his voice cracking through her shock.

The sound of her name snaps her from her trance and she seems to see him for the first time, dull astonishment and disbelief registering in her eyes when she realises who he is. He doesn’t have time for that now though, glancing over his shoulder he asks pointedly, “Can you stand? Can you walk?”

Speech still seems to be beyond her but her composure is returning to her, enough to enable her to nod and begin squirming to her feet, pausing only a moment to relieve the gun from her would-be killer, holding it in a trembling hand as she pushes herself to her feet, swaying slightly, still looking a little dazed from her brush with death.

His hand is still outstretched to her and she takes it in an impulse after a brief hesitation when the sounds of more gunfire erupt overhead. The contact with her inspires another sudden blast in him, greens and reds and golds and dusky oranges, the colours of autumn, burst into bloom around him without warning. The moss on the trees is dark and deep and so vibrant he feels like he could live on this world just by breathing it in. The smoke around them is no longer white but a pale, hazy pink, the kind that attends the sky at sunset. When he looks into her eyes, he sees the small gold flecks he always seems to miss otherwise, the soft, liquid brown of her eyes so much warmer and stronger and fuller now than they are when they’re grey.

He doesn’t have time to wonder at any of this however, or ask her if she’s feeling and seeing and experiencing the same thing. They have to move. They have to move now. Nodding to her and catching her shaky answering gesture, he turns away from the sounds of the hunt behind them and runs, pulling her off into the trees with him, keeping a firm grip on her hand this time, refusing to let them get separated. When he stumbles, threatening to wrench them apart, she holds on firm and rights him, helps him to find his feet again and then tugs him on.

Together they run, hand in hand, one or both of them occasionally turning to fire a warning shot back into the confusion behind them, praying they hit one, praying they hit all of them, kill them all, end this now, make it stop, make it end, make it stop.

He veers sharply off to the left, realising they’re drawing imminently close to the lake and not wanting to put the others in any danger. The cave is too far up the cliff face, and the land around it is far too flat and open for them to be able to reach it out of sight of their pursuers, they have to stay in the forest, trust the trees to confuse and distract and lose their hunters.

He drags them into thicker and thicker underbrush, his chest tight as though ringed by thick iron bands making it impossible to get as much air into his lungs as he needs, praying over and over again, words he hasn’t said in years, words he thought he’d forgotten so long ago, springing to his lips and to his head, praying that it’s still there, that it will hide him again, and her too, that they won’t get caught.

Catching sight of it, his heart leaping into his mouth he pulls her down to the ground with him as he slides, shoving her into the deep hollow in the ground and crawling in after her, pressing her back until he feels her body hit stone then wrapping himself around her, getting in as close to her as he can, desperate not to leave any part of himself exposed to give them away.

Covering her mouth with his hand when she makes a faint whimper of fear and distress as they feel the earth shifting above them as a ranger scans the area for them, he holds his breath and can sense her doing the same. Her eyes meet his in the dark, gleaming, over bright, terror filled, he nods to her, trying to communicate that they’ll be safe here, it’ll be okay, they’ll be okay. His other hand finds hers scrabbling about his hip and holds it, squeezing tightly, his eyes still on hers, still nodding frantically.

They hear company retreat above them and he feels her body release against his, the tension draining from her like a cut wire, leaving her slumping in against him, trembling violently. Cautiously, he takes his hand away from her mouth, pressing a finger to his own to indicate that she needs to stay quiet still. She nods to show that she understands and he inclines his head, glancing back with difficulty, trying to see out and sense what’s going on above them.

Fear lances through him like a bolt of lightning speared through his veins and he presses in against her, pushing her even harder against the wall behind her, shielding her as footsteps press down above them and they hear voices spoken what feels like inches from them.

Her eyes are wide and white all around the edges, her lips slightly parted in a silent scream of terror. Her hands clutch at the front of his shirt, the closest thing she can reach, and that feeling surges through him again, making the cracked purple pendant around her neck catch his eye and the hands of her watch glow bright green instead of ghostly white but he closes his eyes, biting his lip and holding his breath again, not daring to breathe, wanting to stop his heart beating if he could because the way it’s hammering against his ribs he’s sure she can hear it pounding there and he’s almost certain that they can hear it too.

Minutes pass, that feel like hours, that feel like years, trapped down here in this hole with her pressed up warm and trembling against him, burrowing her face against his chest and shaking, his arms around her, pressing them in close together, trying to make sure none of them is showing, none of them is going to give this away, expecting someone to reach in and drag them out any second, one hand clenching around the gun he finds again, swearing that he damn well won’t go down without a fight.

After what seems like a hundred lifetimes, the call to retreat and sweep West is sounded and the company above them moves away and he lets his lungs fill up with air again. A long time passes, but they remain together, not daring to move or show themselves yet, barely daring to even breathe still. When he starts to become aware of her cradled in his arms, he squirms back a little to give her some more space then, motioning for her to stay put and stay quiet, which she does, he cautiously crawls out, scanning the area around them, turning in a circle, feeling like he’s clearing a dangerous house again, the way he would have done a thousand years ago.

Finally, satisfied that they’re definitely alone, he nods and beckons for her to come out, stowing the gun in the holster at his hip again and offering her his hands to help pull her to her feet. She takes them again, both of them bracing for what they know will greet them, and actually taking a moment, in unison this time, to take a look around them, fully see and appreciate their surroundings in a way that’s denied them most of the time, then they let go.

Looking back down at her, he notes the cut on her head, stark and scarlet, though fading the longer he looks and he manages to ask in a hoarse voice, “Are you okay?” Gesturing towards the cut to illustrate his concern. 

Gingerly, she reaches up to probe at the wound, apparently noticing it for the first time. Wincing when her fingers make contact, she forces herself to feel the extent of the damage properly then shakes her head, “No, it’s, it’s not bad, I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?” He presses, squinting down at her, still mildly worried, “There’s a lot of blood.”

“Head wounds always bleed a lot.” She tells him, rummaging in what’s left of her pack and finding a wad of cotton to push against it, securing it with a few plasters in place of proper tape, “I’ll live.” She says grimly.

“There’s nothing else?” He asks, checking her over himself now, “No other injuries or-“

“You came back.” She interrupts, clearly barely listening to a word he’s saying, the look in her eyes deep and sheltered and strange, “You came back for me.” She goes on, a strain of disbelief and confusion in her voice, “I thought that I was dead, I thought they would kill me, I thought, I thought...” She breaks off, shaking and then looks at him with those eyes again, her voice broken to a whisper now, “But you came back.”

Something in her tone makes his hackles rise and he finds himself snapping, “Does that surprise you?” he asks, a little colder and harsher than he’d intended, “It’s not really something you’d expect from someone like me, is it?”

She just stares at him, either unable or unwilling to say what’s on her mind and after a long, strained minute waiting for her, waiting for something, he gives up and turns away, shaking his head and snatching up the few scattered belongings of theirs that had slipped out when he’d dragged her down into the hollow with him.

“We should get going,” he says shortly, not looking back at her, “We need to find the others.”

“Kane, wait.” She interrupts as he begins to move away, her hand brushes against his arm and flavour ripples into a bland and empty world for an instant as she does, making him turn back to her, “Thank you.” She whispers to him, and though her hand now hangs loosely at her side, he can still see the faint gold flecks in her eyes.

Nodding shortly, unable to look away from her, he says faintly, “You’re welcome, Abby.”

****


	6. Part 6 - Trust

_Part 6 – Trust_

They manage to make it back to the others just before first light and slip into the little cave they’re sitting huddled tensely around a low burning fire that no-one has bothered to feed. Clustering around Abby first, they hug her, checking up on her, asking her if she’s hurt? If she’s okay? How did they get away? What happened?

Abby gives them a curt, abbreviated version of what they went through in their escape and then snaps back into her usual self, ignoring the fact she’s shaken and still smeared with blood and grime and sinks down to her knees, her back to Kane, to check on Raven and the cut that’s been clumsily bandaged on her arm.

Glancing over her shoulder she sees Octavia and Bellamy talking quietly with him, thanking him for going back for her, for bringing her back to them and she turns back to focus on Raven and her injuries, picking away the crude bandage and examining the wound beneath, putting a few stitches in it just to be safe and then wrapping it up again a little more expertly.

“Is that it?” She asks quietly, pushing her hair back to feel her forehead and peer into her eyes squinting slightly in the dim light that the cave affords them, irritated that she can’t see properly in the gloom, “Everything else feels alright? What about your leg?”

“I’m good, Abby.” She assures her quietly, a strange edge in her voice. 

“What about the others, is-“ She begins but Raven cuts her off.

Reaching out, she takes her hand in both of hers and lowers her eyes when she murmurs, “Everyone here is okay, Abby, they didn’t nearly _die_ out there.” She whispers tremulously looking up and meeting her eyes, her hand tightening around hers a little.

A shiver passes through her at that. The dark, cruel depths of a gun’s barrel flashes in front of her eyes, transfixing her and making her heart pound the way it had then, as though Raven’s large, dark warm eyes are the cold black gaze of death the way she had done only a few hours before.

Pulling herself together, she forces a smile and shakes her head, “I didn’t nearly die, Raven.” She tries to assure her lightly, “I just got separated that was all.”

Raven watches her suspiciously, something knowing in her eyes when she shoots back quietly, “So if Kane hadn’t come back for you...”

A deafening gun blast of a bullet being forced into the skull of the thing that was about to do the same to her bursts through her body like a shock of lightning exploding through her system. The aftershocks of what happened to her still ripple through her, and will do for some time, she knows that, but she doesn’t see any reason why she should upset Raven or any of the others with that knowledge. They don’t need to know how close it was, and she trusts that Kane won’t say anything, that he’ll stick to her story, though maybe she should have words with him about that...

Jolting herself back forcefully to Raven once more, she says firmly, “He did.” She says, softly stroking her hair back, “He did and I’m fine, okay?” Raven nods hesitantly then offers her a wobbly smile and leans forward to hug her.

Straightening up and trying to smile herself, she does her rounds of the rest of the group, checking on them and making sure they’re all alright. Once she’s satisfied herself of that, she retreats to the back of the cave, feeling a little dizzy and lightheaded, the events of the last twelve hours all deciding to catch up with her at once, leaving her feeling sick and disorientated.

Claustrophobia sets in next and she finds her chest tightening, making it difficult to breathe and she turns, heading for the exit of the little cave they’re all crammed in to. Someone she manages to identify as Octavia grabs her wrist, “Are you okay?” She asks, her voice low and concerned.

She forces another smile she knows will never reach her hollow eyes and nods, “Of course.” She replies tautly, because of course she’s okay, bleeding, choking, dying, she will always be okay for them, “I just need a little air, that’s all.”

Making it out of the cave, she stumbles onto the small ledge that juts out into the open air and closes her eyes, shaking slightly, trying to teach herself how to breathe again when all her body wants to do is choke all of the oxygen from her lungs in her panic.

She sees it all again, she _feels_ it all again, her heart pounds, her ribs glue together, stuck and stiff and making every breath gasped in agony, cold sweat tingles on her skin, her hands tremble uncontrollably and she feels herself sway alarmingly on the spot, reaching out and finding her fingers scrabbling hopelessly against the rough rock wall behind her, trying to steady herself.

“You should get someone to take a look at that.” The quiet voice interrupting her makes her jump violently and reach for the small knife she keeps tucked at her hip, but she only raises it halfway before she recognises him and shoves it away again, still breathing hard, closing her eyes and desperately trying to get herself back under control, not wanting him to see her like this.

“What?” She gasps, pushing back her hair and trying to focus on his words, on what he wants so she can get rid of him and return to the comfort of her solitude.

“Your head.” He says quietly, cautiously stepping in closer towards her and gesturing towards her, “You’re bleeding again.”

“Oh.” She mumbles stupidly, reaching up and brushing her wound lightly, wincing a little as her fingers brush the raw edges of the cut.

“I can...” He offers, trailing off pointedly, clearly expecting her to understand what he wants.

Without really giving permission for it to happen or quite grasping what she’s agreeing to, still feeling distinctly shaken, she finds herself nodding, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” He hovers expectantly for a moment and then she says, “My bag is inside, I-“

“I’ll get it.” He says quickly, “You just...Stay here.”

Nodding again, she lets him slip back inside to make his excuses for why he needs her pack and then sinks down onto the hard ground, her back leaning against the rough, uneven wall behind her, holding her head in her hands, still shaking slightly, little waves of fear still fluttering through her in pulses.

He returns to her and carefully crouches down beside her, peering at her injury, his eyes flickering down to meet hers every few seconds. Staying still and letting him examine her as he begins to pour a wash onto a clean towel to clean it out, she reasons that it’s better him doing this than one of the others and resolves to sit in grim silence and get this over with quickly.

Shifting a little nearer to her, he presses the towel to her forehead and she finds herself gasping out in pain, not expecting it to sting as much as it does. “Sorry.” He murmurs quickly, catching her eye. She shakes her head, “It’s fine.” She insists bluntly, motioning for him to go on, he does so and she bites her lip.

Once he’s finished washing it out, she snatches up her pack herself, “It probably needs stitches.” He observes drily.

“I know.” She answers, rummaging around for a needle and some suitable suturing wire, “I can do it.” She says, but this proves much easier to assert than it does to carry out. After a few seconds and several failed attempts she realises that not only is it almost impossible just because of the fact she can’t see, but that her hands are shaking too badly to enable her to do anything.

Gritting her teeth, she wordlessly hands him the needle and starts to talk him through what he needs to do, but he’s ignoring her and already starting without waiting for her instructions.

“You know how to stitch someone up?” She asks, trying to sound conversational but from the way his mouth tightens she can tell it came off as too hostile for his tastes.

He nods, admitting with a small shrug, “I haven’t done it in a while.” Carefully leaning in to her and shifting his position so he can see better as he slides the needle into her skin for the first stitch, “But I took a crash course in emergency field medicine.” Smiling wryly and saying a little apologetically, “They won’t be very pretty, but they should hold.”

She nods jerkily, trying not to move too much and braces a little more against the wall, cursing herself for not being able to stop trembling still and quietens to let him work and concentrate in silence. His hands are surprisingly deft and gentle, his movements soft and careful and she finds herself forcefully avoiding his eyes, noticing little patches of gold sunlight streaming through the trees behind them ,and when she does, she closes her eyes altogether, wanting him to be done so her stomach with stop twisting and fluttering the way it’s currently doing.

Finally, he draws away and starts packing up so she knows he’s finished. Gingerly, she reaches up to inspect his handiwork then pronounces herself satisfied, “It’ll do.” She says shortly, struggling to push herself to her feet, suddenly acutely aware of how close they are.

Handing her back her pack, he pushes a small tin of food towards her, widening his eyes significantly when she opens her mouth to ask why, he just shrugs and answers the unasked question, “You’ve been through a lot without eating much, it’s a bad combination, probably why you feel a little shaky.” He says quietly, his eyes watching her carefully, judging her reaction to that.

“Yeah.” She says, cracking open the tin and chewing the little cube of processed protein she finds inside, privately wishing to herself that that was all it was. The gunshot and the panic that had accompanied it, causing her heart to stop as she was sure the bullet had just been fired into her head still echoing through her traumatised memories.

“But if it’s not...” He murmurs quietly, studying her intently, as though he’s read her mind, as though he knows what’s going on in her head, what drove her out here in the first place. 

“It is.” She says curtly, and then before she can stop herself she abruptly and definitely changes the subject to stop this before it starts, “What were you doing out here?”

Shrugging, he just answers lightly, “I needed some air.”

She studies him suspiciously then decides that she’s had enough of that, and enough of him, and turns to head back inside, dreading the thought and the sleepless few hours of tossing and turning that await her, and the tormented dreams that will surely come if she can manage to convince sleep to take her, but wanting to be away from him, already feeling him starting to slip under her skin again, winding her up, making her heart beat a little faster and her senses sharpen in ways that make her tremble.

“Wait.” He says quietly, reaching out, his fingers fumbling against her wrist before he quickly pulls his hand back at the look in her eyes, “Would you come with me?” He asks her, his tone even and flat.

“Why?” She asks, startled by this request to leave the safety of their little cave so soon after they managed to get here.

Sighing, he shakes his head, rubbing his eyes and finally looks straight in hers as he says calmly, “I want to show you something.” She continues to look wary, more than happy staying here and not venturing back into the woods as the sun begins to sink and they appear even more ominous and oppressive than they did by day, and he adds, “It’s not far, it’ll only take a minute.”

Nodding, she shrugs her bag onto her back and motions wordlessly for him to lead the way, which he does, looking irritable at her hesitation but also something she could swear was mild amusement dances in his eyes and around the corner’s of his lips as he leads her away from the others, offering her a hand to help her down the steep incline, which she ignores, in preference for stumbling her unsteady way down unsupported.

He leads her to the edge of the trees, gesturing for her to be quiet as they reach the fringes. When they’re both standing at the peak of the drop-off, side by side, he glances down at her and then out at the dangerously flat landscape again and points to their left, a little way off in the distance. Following the line of his finger, she sees a small black hub, buzzing with lights and electricity, tiny ant-like dots moving in formation in and out of and around it.

Studying it for a moment, she turns to find him looking at her, his eyes guarded, and she shakes her head, “Why are you showing me this?” She asks him, still confused as to his motives for this little moonlight wander.

“After what happened back there, in the forest,” he says, jerking his head back the way they had come and she feels what’s becoming an increasingly, achingly familiar shiver of fear tremble down her spine, “I wanted you to see that I was telling you the truth before, about the armed camp, and if you look,” he places a delicate hand on the small of her back making her tense and shudder again as he turns her body a little, pointing and having her follow his gaze once more to the broad, flat grey road that she knows they would have walked along, “That’s where we would have ended up. There’s a hill, just before you come there, it hides everything from sight, by the time people realise what they’ve walked in to, it’s too late to turn back, it would have been a slaughter.”

Her lips part slightly, to ask a question, to murmur a reassurance, to say _something_ but the words never come and he feels the tense silence her tight throat leaves behind, “I didn’t know that that was going to happen, I promise.” He murmurs softly, “I thought we were safest coming through here, I wanted to show you that we _were_ safer coming through here, despite what happened-“

She cuts him off with a nod and a soft hand resting on the top of his arm, that makes them both quiver slightly, but they both ignore it, looking into one another’s eyes, “You saved my life, Kane.” She reminds him quietly, a little bemused by why he thinks all of this is necessary after that.

“Well,” He says, a definite wry smile quirking the corners of his lips as he studies her with piercing eyes, speckled with light gold that she’s become used to seeing there by now, “I didn’t really think that counted for much with you, judging by your reaction to my saving Raven.” He says, in a voice that’s half teasing and half serious, “You might have thought that it was all an elaborate and dramatic ploy to gain your trust and-“

He breaks off as she glowers irritably at him, but feels something lighten in her chest all the same, which she only realises as the tension releases, that she desperately needed, “You’re a jackass, Kane.” She informs him flatly, struggling to keep any hint of amusement from her voice.

“A jackass that you need?” He pushes mildly, eyebrows raised, shoving his hands in his pockets as he studies her.

“If I did need you,” She begins, putting a firm, pointed emphasis on the word ‘if’, “That wouldn’t mean that I wanted you, or that I liked you.”

“Trusted me?” He presses lightly. 

“Maybe.” She says evenly, trying to give nothing away either in her tone or in her expression, “We’ll see.”

Nodding lightly, he glances back out at the open landscape sprawled out before them, “I can work with maybe.”

She hovers for another moment, glancing up and seeing a deep red star pulsing above them like a heart, staring at it for a moment, revelling in it before she closes her eyes and looks away, turning back and heading for the cave, saying with a firm note of finality in her voice, “Goodnight, Kane.”

She feels his eyes on her as she starts back for the cave, her head somehow, for the first time since they got back, blessedly quiet and she feels a sudden surge of gratitude towards him well up inside her, not just for coming back for her and for saving her life, but for enabling her to live with it afterwards, then she hears him whisper quietly, “Night, Abby.”

The sound of her name on his lips makes the red star blazing above her burn a little brighter.

****


	7. Part 7 - Perspective

_Part 7 – Perspective_

They’ve settled in the camp they’ve made for a few days now and she’s taking advantage of the little lake they found nearby to wash some of their clothes before they move off again, back into the wilderness. The spot they’ve managed to find is sheltered and secluded and they needed somewhere to sink roots for a week or so after the issue in the forest that left them all a little shaken.

 There’s something strangely soothing about the activity, made more ironic by the fact that laundry was always one of the things she hated doing most at home, a task that she usually lovingly delegated to Jake who insisted he didn’t mind it that much.

But here, and now, with the world torn into shreds and turned upside down around them, she finds that she doesn’t mind it that much. It gives her an excuse to be alone if nothing else, to sit on the edge and soak her feet in the cool, fresh running water, which is nice.

When Jake died, that day the world ended, that was the day that her world was served up and flavoured with ash and dust. Everything she ate tasted of grief, everything she saw reeked of death, of loss. Every time she opened her eyes and beheld the world in the dismal black and greys she had so desperately longed to escape in her childhood, she remembered, she remembered what had happened, she remembered Jake’s death, she remembered what she was without.

And the worst part was that she was rapidly losing the ability to remember what it was like before. She’s forgetting what hope smells and tastes and feels and looks like now. She forgets the colour of the walls in her bedroom. She knows they were red, but she can’t picture the shade, can’t see it in her mind’s eye anymore.

All of the colours of her happiness are washing away, like a delicate water colour that was left too long exposed to the harsh realities of the world, battered by wind and rain until everything but the hollow skeleton of the original sketch was gone. The colours diluted further and further and faded more and more until anyone looking at it for the first time would swear it had never known anything than the dismal greys and whites it appeared in. The sharp, vibrant textures and emotions that were drawn and encouraged from those colours faded with them. That’s how she feels. She feels blank and empty, washed out and faded.

Like the colours she barely remembers, Jake is fading too. Her memories of him slip away a little more every day, like grains of sand trickling through an hourglass. She can’t quite picture the way he laughed, or the way he used to smile any more, the voice that she tries to recall and put to him when she thinks of him sounds wrong, it doesn’t sound like him, it doesn’t fit. But she doesn’t remember how to make it sound right. Every time she reaches for memories of him, of them, she finds less and less to call up to soothe her at night.

That terrifies her. She doesn’t remember what it was like to be in love, to be happy, to have hope; and she’s losing her memories of the man that made her that way. She’s losing her feeling, her grip on life, her taste for it. She hasn’t been living since the day he died, not properly. She’s been plunged into darkness and left there, for her soul to slowly be eroded away by the horrors she’s seen. 

Shaking her head, she forces herself not to think of that, focussing on the water lapping against her ankles instead. It’s cool and sharp and refreshing, something she can still _feel,_ something, one of the few things, she can still experience almost as fully as she could have done before. There’s a pulse to the lake water that ripples against the bare skin she has submerged in it, the current that hides beneath the surface acting almost like a heart, making the environment feel actually alive and real, giving her something to hold on to still, some sensation, some sense that the whole world hasn’t died and given up when the bombs went off. It survived. And so did she.

Glancing up as she feels droplets of the cold water splash her she sees Raven wading awkwardly towards her, deciding to walk all along the riverbed rather than just settle on the bank and dip her feet the way Abby has. Bellamy walks beside her, one hand on her arm which she has outstretched to him, both of them laughing a little as he supports her and teases her all at once.

She wonders what they see when they look around them. If they see the colours she used to, the bright gold of the sun dancing across the water, the shades of pink and orange in the rocks and shells that line the bed, the deep blue of the sky, the dark green of the trees that shelter them. Looking back at them again, the way they look at one another, she thinks that they do, but that neither of them really sees it for staring at each other.

Smiling, half in happiness for them and half in sadness and bittersweet memories for herself, she busies herself with her clothes again, scrubbing them in the water, scrubbing away the memories burned in to them; even Jake’s favourite shirts and jumpers she had grabbed up as she left were losing his scent, losing him the way she was. 

Starting in surprise, she looks up again as Raven splashes noisily over to her and settles herself down beside her, dismissing Bellamy with a faint wave of her hand, sending him off grumbling irritably about not being wanted, but not looking overly hard done by, all things considered. Her surprise extends further when Raven plucks another shirt from the pile that sits between them and dunks it cheerfully into the water at their feet.

“What?” She demands airily, catching Abby’s raised eyebrow at this sudden desire to help in a task she’s always bluntly despised in the past.

“You hate washing.” She reminds her pointedly, eyebrows still raised questioningly. Raven shrugs and mutters feebly about fresh air and scenery until Abby lightly elbows her and prompts, “What are you really here for?”

“A girl can’t have an ulterior motive and keep it to herself for two minutes?” She grumbles irritably, dumping the shirt under the water again and rummaging it around, “Especially when the price she’s paying is washing Bellamy’s dirty laundry.”

Abby laughs at that and nods, “Fair enough, keep your ulterior motives to yourself for now.” Looking up she catches Raven’s shirt beginning to drift through her fingers as she gazes back in Bellamy’s direction and she hastily fishes it out, dumping it, sodden, into Raven’s lap and making her jump and squeal in sudden surprise and dismay, jolting her back to the present.

“What was that for?” She demands indignantly, glowering at Abby, unceremoniously drowning the shirt in the water again, as though in punishment for soaking her.

Instead of answering, she just smiles and asks another question, “How is it going between you two?”

“What?” Raven asks innocently.

Rolling her eyes she jerks her head back towards the camp behind her, “How’s Bellamy?” She prompts, a question a little harder to ignore than the last one.

“A jackass, as usual.” Raven replies promptly, her tone bright and cheery, “But he has his uses.” Shaking her head, she smiles at that and returns her focus to the task at hand for a moment, jolted back to herself when Raven abruptly demands, “What about you and Kane?”

“What _about_ me and Kane?” She asks cautiously, her tone becoming a little harder, looking up to find Raven ignoring her drowning shirt in favour of watching her eyes instead, feeling something pull in her stomach at the question, which only frustrates and irritates her more.

“Well, when you are two going to get it over with and start doing it?” Raven demands bluntly, tilting her head and watching her, her tone completely conversational.

Abby chokes. “Excuse me?” She splutters.

Shrugging, all Raven offers up as some sort of explanation for that is, “He likes you.”

She chews over that for a moment or so, wondering, weighing every interaction, everything he’s made her feel, in itself an achievement. But she very hastily shelves those thoughts, shaking her head and trying to brush Raven off with a faint half smile and a wry comment, “Because he’s pulling my pigtails and looking at me every now and then?”

“No,” Raven replies matter-of-factly, completely ignoring the sarcasm clinging to every word, “He fights with you.” She says, as though that should clear matters up and make things obvious but Abby just blinks at her in confusion. “Like _really_ fights with you.” Raven expands, deepening her bemusement as opposed to helping restore some sort of sense to the proceedings.

“Raven, I don’t think-“ She begins carefully, still not entirely sure she wants to talk about this, but Raven doesn’t seem inclined to give her that option and let things drop.

“You’re worth that.” She tells him, watching her with keen eyes, “He takes that time with you, hashes things out, yells at you, the whole thing. He respects you, and your leadership, he never tries to usurp it, he just tries to make you see things from his point of view.”

“And you think that means he wants me?” She demands sceptically, raising her eyebrows and ducking her head to start washing her shirt again, working out a dark stain that it takes her too long to realise is blood.

“Of course it does.” Raven smirks, lightly jostling her while she shakes her head, trying to focus and stay present here with her. 

She squints up at her, trying to laugh this off and shaking her head. Laughing a little too now, Raven flicks a little water at her and says with a feral little grin, “Well he’s not exactly hard on the eyes is he?”

Unable to stop herself smiling, and, absurdly, flushing a little as well, heat rushing into her cheeks she manages to tease, “Are you sure _you_ don’t want him?”

Raven just lets a wolfish smile tug at her lips in response to that, “I’m covered in that department.” She replies, looking quite pleased with herself and that fact.

“I’m aware.” Abby tells her lightly, both of them smirking now.

“Anyway,” Raven says, shaking back her hair, her tone maddeningly matter-of-fact once again, “I don’t think it’d work even if I _was_ interested, he’s got eyes for no-one but you.” Shifting slightly she just says, “Think about it?” 

“Do you have a bet running on this?” Abby demands starkly, glaring at her good-naturedly, wondering if her suddenly over-zealous matchmaker has eyes on Octavia’s hand-knitted scarf again and this is the price of it.

“Well,” Raven says, struggling to her feet and pegging out her very well-washed shirt, “ _If_ I did, then that would mean everyone in camp was seeing this....”

Leaning back as Raven wanders back towards the camp and Bellamy, she lets her stop her work for a moment, letting the blood-stained shirt soak a little while she thinks over Raven’s words. Her fingers brush again over Jake’s watch and she trembles faintly at the thought of moving on, of letting him go, of being with someone else.

 The thought is frightening but a little exciting all at once. She doesn’t know how she feels, or how she’s supposed to feel. They could all be dead tomorrow, the others seem to have grabbed hold of that notion much more fully than she has herself, they’re not wasting time, they’re not wondering, they’re not getting lost in the past. But even so, she doesn’t know if she’s ready for that yet, and she doesn’t know if she wants to be, not with Kane.

He makes her feel something, that’s true, something she hasn’t felt in a long, long time. And there have been too many little incidents with him to ignore, too many times she’s seen things she thought she’d never see again after she lost Jake but still...

Jake would want her to be happy, would want her to be with Kane if that was what she wanted, if that would help her get through all of this, she knows he would. But knowing what Jake would want and figuring out what she wants herself are two very distinct things, and knowing what she wants is proving to be infinitely harder.

Maybe Raven’s right, maybe he does want this with her, maybe he does feel the same things that she’s feeling, seeing the same things that she’s seeing, maybe there’s a chance for them. But maybe there’s not.

She lost her soul mate when the world ended. She never intended to find someone else. She didn’t think it was possible to have anyone else after that. She doesn’t want anyone else after that. And she doesn’t want him. Shaking herself, she turns back to her shirt, to washing the bloodstain from the collar, reminding herself that this is what her world consists of now; blood and fire where there’s no such thing as second chances.

****

Turning in surprise at the sudden sound of silence, the absence of the deafening blasts of the pistol ringing off suddenly into quiet a disruption of the rhythmic shots he’s been hearing in the background of him sitting stripping and cleaning the guns in his pack.

A few days earlier, the knowledge that he had been a cop before the world had gone to hell had spread around the camp and as a result Octavia had come to him to ask if he could teach her how to shoot properly. They had a few guns between them but none of them seemed to have much expert training in how to properly handle them and he’d quickly decided that showing her what to do probably couldn’t hurt.

 If they were attacked again, which seems increasingly likely after the incident in the forest a few days back, it would be nothing but an advantage to have another sharp shooter on their team, and Octavia had quickly proven herself a fast learner and a good shot, to his surprise and pleasure and an attentive student besides.

Half-rising, thinking vaguely that she might be having trouble reloading the clips, knowing they can be stubborn, he’s surprised to find her leaning against a tree trunk, waiting for him to wander over to see why she’s suddenly stopped, watching him attentively with a curious look in her eyes. Deciding to let her make the first move, he stops a few feet from her and lets her say evenly, “Can I ask you something?”

He nods, a little thrown by this, but not seeing any potential harm in it, “Of course.” He says, gesturing for her to go on.

Pushing herself a little closer to him she asks evenly, “What’s going on between you and Abby?”

He blinks at her in mild astonishment at the question and the implication that there’s anything between them at all, “Nothing.” He tells her, startled, “I think she’s marked me as ‘public enemy number one’.” He points out fairly, raising a curious eyebrow at her.

Octavia smiles a little slyly and shrugs, “But do you like her?” she asks, placing an emphasis on the word ‘like’ that makes him shiver a little.

“I, I don’t really know what’s not to like.” He answers carefully, wondering why she’s asking and where all of this is coming from as he tries to offer some sort of reply, “She’s intelligent, clearly, a good leader, a good _person_.” He muses softly, “Which is...Saying something in the times we live in, that someone can still be completely good.” Giving himself a little shake, he clears his throat and goes on, “She’s compassionate and down-to-Earth, reliable, but stubborn,” he makes the last word a growl and shrugs, acutely aware of Octavia’s gaze carefully studying him, “Very stubborn, but still...” He trails off feeling a little foolish and casts around desperately for a change of subject, thoughts racing.

The question seemed simple enough, and innocently posed, at least on first blush, but it’s a more tangled problem and one that sets him to wondering about things that are most likely better left alone. There’s something about that woman, something that he hasn’t felt in a long time, something that draws him in to her, inexorable as a current or a magnetic force, something he can’t shake. She gets under his skin, in a good way and a bad, she infuriates him and inspires things in him that he was sure had been deadened long ago.

There’s steel in her spine and more strength in her soul than she knows. Her eyes are full of grief and pain, haunted by ghosts she can’t let go of, he sees that every time he looks at her. And despite her strength, there’s a vulnerability to her, a rawness that drives him away from her. Whatever she’s seen, whatever she’s been through, whatever agony this world has forced her to carry upon already over-burdened shoulders, there remains something entirely good and pure and human about her. He can see that in her. She has her principles, morals she won’t unbend or overcome whatever happens. Whatever she’s had to do to survive, to make her people survive, she’s never crossed those boundaries, never crossed her lines. She has no blood on her hands, and never will...

Octavia jolts him suddenly back to himself, interrupting his conflicted, meandering thoughts as she says, with a small smirk, “So that’s a yes?”

“No.” He says, a little too quickly, judging by her reaction and the heat that chooses that moment to flood his cheeks, “No, I, I wouldn’t say, I _respect_ her, but-“

“But how do you _feel_ about her?” Octavia pushes, her eyes wide and innocent.

He opens his mouth, not quite knowing what to say, not quite knowing how he feels, or how he wants to feel. He feels warm when he’s with her, something he hasn’t felt in a while, and he sees things he hasn’t seen in so long, things he had forgotten, things that were revelations to him. Things that were simple once, when the world was softer and sweeter and he took so many things for granted before they were taken from him. He still remembers that first night, by the fire, when he touched her, that feeling, the colours, so rich and vibrant that they were almost overwhelming, even though they were only present for a few seconds.

A part of him desperately wants that again, a part of him craves that, and craves her, the part that instinct fuels and controls wants him to pursue her, and he thinks she feels the same at that base level. But the older, more worn part of him, the part that remembers what he’s done, what he’s seen, what he’s been through, is loathe to expose himself to that all over again.

She’s intoxicating and addictive and something he could easily come to fall in love with and want over and over and over again, but at the same time she’s dangerous. There’s something untameable about her. To have her, to be with her, he would have to trust her, he would have to love her, completely and unconditionally, and for that to happen he would have to open himself up to those feelings, to those parts of himself that have been closed off for years, he would have to open himself up to the possibility of going through all of that again. Having everything and losing all.

He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t think she wants that either. Whatever it is between them, whatever there might be, whatever he might come to feel, and he knows he could, the last few weeks proves that, where he’s gone from hating her to saving her life in a short space of time, he knows exactly where this path leads to, where every instinct he has and some urging beyond that seems to want him to walk down, and he knows what they could have.

But he knows that he doesn’t want that. And nor does she. And so it ends there. He can’t feel anything for her when he hasn’t felt anything for anyone in too long, there are too many bridges burned to ever let him go back to that. He won’t, he’s not, not for anyone, and certainly not for her. He doesn’t feel anything for her, he concludes, with an attempt at ringing finality, at least not, _definitely_ not the way that Octavia is implying.

“I don’t feel anything for her, Octavia,” He tells her calmly, “At least, not that way.”

“You saved her.” She presses flatly, looking frankly disbelieving of his assertion.

“I would have gone back for you, or Bellamy, anyone.” He tries to insist to her, taking a sudden moment to consider this and wonder if he would have.

 When it had been Abby, he hadn’t really thought about it, he had just reacted to discovering her missing, on some instinct, he hadn’t ever stopped to consider the wisdom of the plan, he had just turned and run back for her, if it had been one of the others...No, he would have gone back. He was a cop. There’s still some sort of instinct ingrained in him after all those years when that was his job, to protect people, sometimes at risk to his own safety. That’s all it was. He’s sure.

Before Octavia can continue her interrogation, he manages to ask a question of his own, “Why are you asking me all of this?” He asks curiously.

Shrugging unhelpfully all she offers him is, “I just wondered that’s all. You seem like you’d be good together.” She hesitates a moment and then she adds, “And I’ve seen the way that you look at her, when you’re alone together...”

She turns and leaves him alone, pondering over that then, wondering at her meaning, at the way he might look at Abby Griffin when they’re alone together. But she’s seeing things that aren’t there, that can’t be there. Even if he did feel so disposed towards her, which he doesn’t, for a variety of reasons, _good_ reasons, there’s still the fact that she doesn’t look at him or think of him in that way, and rarely thinks of him in any way if it isn’t condemning one idea or another and wondering why he’d come stumbling into her life; which he wonders at himself sometimes. But she certainly doesn’t see him as anything like that.

He wonders what on Earth Octavia could have been thinking bringing this up. Maybe him plunging recklessly back into the woods to find Abby might have seemed a gesture that could be taken as something more than it was. But they didn’t know what he’d  done in the past, what he had to atone for, what he had lost along the way, if they did, they wouldn’t have questioned any of the decisions he’d made up to now.

This world doesn’t leave any room for doubt any more, and it doesn’t leave room for second chances either. Not for him. Not for people like him. Not after everything that’s been said and done. His hands are bloodstained and raw and too heavy for anyone to hold after all this time. 

****


	8. Part 8 - Run

_Part 8 – Run_

The small flower in front of her, bowed down and struggling, exposed to all of the elements, the rest of the growth that once surrounded and sheltered it torn away by blasts and war, leaving it alone, pushing up through a crack in the scorched Earth, surviving when it shouldn’t have, the way they all have, becomes stained at the crisp white edges with little blossoms of pink that fade in and out of focus, like ink drops in water, and she knows he’s behind her before she hears the soft crunch of his boots that announces his approach.

Turning, she stands to meet him, something that seems to take him aback for a second before he just decides to go with it and settles, glancing out around them a moment before refocusing on her and saying, “I’ve been looking through our supplies.” She grimaces at that, not needing to hear the next words he says to know their truth, “We’re running low on, well, _everything_. We need a top up or we’re not going to last much longer.”

“I know that.” She answers tersely, dragging her fingers through her hair. It’s been a looming and mounting issue that’s been plaguing her days, and her nights, hoping he’s here to offer some sort of solution than just draw attention to a fairly apparent problem.

Fortunately, he does, moving in a little closer he says quietly, “There’s a little town nearby. It’s not marked on a lot of the maps of the area so there’s a chance it’s gone largely unnoticed and untouched in the aftermath of all of this, it’s not a landmark city by any means.” He tells her, piquing her interest. They’ve passed through a few towns since they left, stealing into them under cover of darkness to try and find what they can, but more often than not they’ve been completely cleaned out by the original residents and the larger groups that knew about them and have already passed through them and scrounged up everything they could use. What he’s saying might be the lifeline and the lucky break that they desperately need.

“It’s isolated, and it is small,” he goes on, “but it has a few shops and stores that might have some things we can salvage in them; let us stock up on everything we need, food, medical supplies, maybe even some more ammo to top us up.”

Watching him carefully and knowing him well enough to sense the tone and read between the lines to the implication he’s waiting for her to pick on, she crosses her arms over her chest and asks tautly, “What’s the catch?” Thinking that, whatever it is, they might have to risk it. They need more supplies, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else nearby they have any hope of getting some from.

“The town isn’t marked,” He reminds her, “But it’s open and on a wide flat expanse of land. If we’re in there and someone, or something, else decides to chance on us we’ll have a hard time making it out and back to camp in one piece, let alone with any supplies.”

Chewing over this, she weighs her options, asking him some more questions to buy herself some time and think it over, “How far away is it?”

“Not far. A mile, two at most.” He tells her, “We could probably make the round trip in a day if we left now.”

Cautiously, judging his reaction to her next words, she challenges him, “You think we should go?”

“I don’t think that we have much choice in the matter.” He counters, ever the politician with the overly careful answers he always gives her.

Glowering in frustration, she shakes her head irritably, “That’s not what I asked. If you were me, would you go?”

“I’ve come to you, telling you about this because I think we should go.” He answers, suddenly all deliberate and blunt, “But not all of us.” He adds after a moment.

“No.” She agrees, she’s not risking her whole group on this gamble, where there isn’t even a certainty of it being worth the risk they’re taking. “No, they should stay here with most of the supplies that we have.”

“They?” He echoes, raising an eyebrow at her.

Setting her stance stubbornly she says, with a strain of defiance in her voice, “Yes, they.” She growls in a tone that shouldn’t broke any argument but she’s almost certain will with him, still, she asserts flatly, “If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”

“Abby-“ He begins, looking none too pleased by this suggestion, which he clearly hadn’t had on the cards when he started this.

“I said if you’re going then I’m coming with you, Kane.” She informs him flatly, “That’s not up for debate. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it together. You’ll need someone to watch your back; and I’ll need someone to watch mine.”

She reflects briefly on how strange that sentiment is. For so long after he’d first join them, she’d spent time watching her own back, expecting him to plunge a knife into it at any point. Now she trusts him to go on a lonely, dangerous supply run with her, and for him to have her back even as she watches his. This development in their relationship was never something she had counted on or anticipated but seems to have crept up on each other all the same. There are worse things that could have come from it, she supposes reasonably.

Crossing her arms across her chest again, she glowers at him boldly, daring him to try and tell her that she should remain in camp where it’s safe and that he’s capable of going on his own, it’s his idea, his risk, and not one that she needs to take as well, all of which she’s more than ready to flatly counter and beat him down to accepting her way of things.

For once though, he doesn’t turn it into a three hour contest and try and continue arguing with her, seeming to sense that her mind is mad up on the matter, and to see some of the wisdom in it. Two people will be better than one for something like this, but won’t be hindered the way they would by a larger number.

Once they’ve settled that, she returns to the group to explain the plan to them. She’s met with a little protest from Bellamy and Lincoln but she just calmly repeats her instructions and reasons to them until they grudgingly agree with her. She and Kane each take empty packs intended to be loaded up with supplies from the town, what they were carrying already is divided up among those who will be staying in this second little splinter group. They’re left with instructions on how long to wait here and when to move on and where to if they’re not back by a certain time, then, with a certain feeling of reluctance and trepidation, the two groups part.

It feels strange being alone with him, completely alone, for the first time since he came back for her in the woods and helped her to escape with him. Shivering at the memory, the faint echo of a gunshot still ringing through the weeks that have passed since then to haunt her now, she looks around her and tries to interest herself in something else to take her mind off of it.

This doesn’t prove as challenging as she might have expected. With him by her side, her eyes are drawn by more things than they might have had she been alone. On the gently rising hills in the distance she can see tiny dots of colour arranged in neat rows, fields of flowers that somehow escaped the violence of the nuclear war that ripped the land apart, and would have escaped her notice as well, if she hadn’t caught the faint flickers of colour that fade in and out, that she knows have everything to do with the man who walks beside her.

As she comes to that conclusion and the realisation that she knows that much about him, that he has this effect on her, an effect that she’s coming to take an inordinate amount of guilty pleasure in, not understanding, not wanting, not feeling ready, but relishing in it all the same, it hits her that she knows very little about him.

 He was a cop, she recalls, and managed to make it through this apocalypse alone, or so he claims, until he met them, but beyond that, she doesn’t know a lot about him as a person; no more than he really knows about her, she supposes. It seems incredible then that they can have this connection, that he has the power to make her feel so _alive_ when she’s been so numb for months, while they know so relatively little about one another.

They hadn’t needed to when they’d argued, teeth bared and hackles raised, tearing chunks out of one another and loving the fight almost as much as the stances they were arguing for, but now, striding down a steep slope with him catching her head to steady her when she slips every now and then, she realises that she has a craving in the pit of her stomach to know more about this man, to find out things about him, to understand him; past the assumptions she’s made about him and the little she’s been able to gather from reading between the lines.

Following on from this, she finds herself asking, before her brain has quite decided if it wants to ask anything at all, “How do you know so much about this area?”

He shrugs, not looking at her, focusing on the path in front of them, and the outer shell of the town he had mentioned that she too can see sitting just ahead of them, “I was a cop, this area was one of the ones that I patrolled. I’ve been called out to almost every little town in the area at one time or another, it was my job to know it...And I was good at my job.” He adds the last after a moment’s pause, but he adds it.

Her brow furrows slightly and she squints quizzically at him, “I thought you said you were from Carolina.” She says carefully, her tone not overly hostile but getting there.

His eyes flick round to meet hers for a second, the faintest half smile quirking his lips at her suspicion, something that’s somehow become familiarly endearing to them after this time, a reminder of the way they first started, and fondly remembered now they’re here, having come so far.

 “I was.” He confirms maddeningly vague, doing her the courtesy of expanding more without prompting and saving her the frustration of having to coax that out of him, “I moved around a lot.” He says, a faint edge to his voice telling her that he’s not going to give away on more details on why that was, and that the issue is still too sensitive for her to feel comfortable asking, “I got to know a lot of places. This was the one I had landed in when the world ended. I made a point of getting to know as much of a place as I could when I first arrived. That knowledge could have saved my life on the job. I know almost every inch of the land around here,” he confides, “Or at least I used to.” He adds grimly as an afterthought.

Nodding absently, she realises that that’s a sentiment she can echo and understand herself. So much has changed that she barely recognises herself anymore, never mind the lay of the land or the life she once had, which, with every day that goes by now, feels more and more like it belonged to someone else that she distantly knew, it no longer feels like hers.

“What about you?” He asks her quietly, his eyes meeting hers as he looks up to give her a hand on the final rocky feet of the hill they’ve just scrambled down to reach the road again.

“What about me?” She asks vaguely, too busy concentrating more on not toppling down onto the road, and of the warmth of his strangely soft fingers against her hand, to really pay much attention to what he’s saying.

“What did you do before?” He says patiently, helping her find her feet again and then setting off in the direction of the approaching town with her beside him, very happy to be on firm, secure tarmac once again. “Before all of this, I mean. You’ve never told me.” He says, gesturing around them and watching her as they walk.

Squinting up at him, she says slowly, “I didn’t think you’d need to be told, it’s pretty obvious, I think you know already.”

He shrugs, smiling slightly at that, “Humour me.” He suggests lightly, “We have a lot of time to kill before we get there.”

Eyes twinkling, she finds a smile lightly curving her own lips, though she can’t remember having told them to, and can’t remember the last time she really smiled at anything, come to think on it, but gives herself a little shake as she shoots back, “Maybe I should make you guess then.”

He laughs at that and she feels her smile broadening, both of them thinking back to the first night he had spent in camp and the conversation they had had over the fire.

“I was a doctor.” She replies as the laughter fades, sobering up a little, “A trauma surgeon in my local ER.”

He nods steadily, “I had guessed some sort of doctor.” He confides to her, “Trauma surgeon is a tough job though.” He murmurs quietly.

“Says the cop.” She shoots back fairly.

Shrugging noncommittally he just answers, “Different words, different pressures. Cops often have to put themselves at risk to do their jobs, but I could handle that more easily than I could handle having someone else’s life thrust into my hands with only a few minutes warning about what I’m going to be dealing with.”

She’s quiet for a moment after that, never really having considered it in such stark terms like that before, deciding eventually that he’s making it sound far more dramatic and sensational than it really was. Thinking about it now, she’d give anything to return to the relative peace and security of her hectic surgery room. And then she finds herself telling him that.

“It was easier than all of this.” She murmurs quietly, gesturing hopelessly around them, the wasteland people had once called home, had once centred their lives in, the gun at her hip, when she had never carried so much as pepper spray before, the loss that weighs heavy on her heart, the grief that stalks behind her eyes, the demons that drag her beneath the depths every single night she closes her eyes to sleep. 

“It was cleaner than this.” His eyes flicker and darken as she goes on in hushed tones, “What we have now, what we’re stuck with now, is a mess. There are no rules, no morals, no right, no wrong, just survival...” Trailing off she shakes her head, running her fingers distractedly through her hair before she goes on, a little more shakily, “Being a trauma surgeon wasn’t exactly _easy_ ,” She muses softly, “It was hard, draining and scary sometimes. Losing a patient was always impossible and having to tell their families...” She shivers slightly, but forces herself to go on, “But it was rewarding too, it was all worth it, all of the blood and sweat and tears and time, it was worth it, to save even one person. It was a world that I understood, I understood the pressures, the trials and the problems. The balance of life and death, that person relying on me, having everything in my hands was, I could understand that, I could deal with that.” She shakes her head slowly, her voice hardening a little as she confesses that, “I would go back to that, that job, that life, in a second, if I could...” She laughs hollowly, “Though I suppose everyone left wants to go back.”

He nods, a bittersweet look in his eyes, a sad smile playing about his lips, “Yes.” He whispers softly, “But we can’t.”

The rest of the way they walk in silence, both lapsing into quiet after their conversation but fortunately, they’re not given long to dwell on it as they come up to the town’s boundaries a few minutes later and slip quietly inside, moving much more slowly and cautiously now and she can’t help but notice that he’s loosened the gun at his hip in his holster and one hand keeps knocking against it every few seconds, as though trying to reassure himself that it’s still there.

The first few shops they duck in to still have plenty of supplies for them to make use of, she’s delighted to find, and the stacks of food that they find, as well as warmer clothes and a few extra blankets she’s sure will keep them going for a good few months at a push. As they’re wandering through to the other side, they even find a little pharmacy on the end of one street. 

He pushes in to it first, all caution, taking nothing for granted, despite the fact that, like so many of the places they’ve passed through, this town is full of nothing but dust and ghosts. She doesn’t begrudge him his checks though, being careful is the only reason any of them are still alive, and she supposes old habits are hard to kick, even after the world has ended...Perhaps especially after the world has ended.

They’re rummaging in the back of the shop, behind the counter, Abby delighting in how many strong antibiotics and painkillers there still are when, without any warning at all, Kane grabs her wrist, pulling her roughly down beside him, making several of the little bottles she had been examining spill from her hands and roll in all directions across the floor around them.

Furious, she makes to both pull away from him and gather them up as well as demand to know what the Hell he’s playing at but then she hears what he hears as well and freezes in place. The faint murmur of rough, harsh voices his hand coiled tightly around the top of her arm, keeping her down beside him.

Her eyes meet his as they wait here, still clutching a single bottle of antibiotics, holding it so tightly trying to stop her hand from shaking as she becomes acutely aware of her heart hammering faster and faster and faster in her chest which feels almost unbearably tight as they wait, shaking, pleading, praying that whoever is outside won’t come in, that they’ll continue on further into the town in search of food and other supplies.

Shaking loose of Kane’s hold on her arm, she grabs his hand instead, staring at him, looking for some sort of reassurance and comfort and he duly squeezes back and nods to her, “It’ll be okay.” He half whispers half mouths to her. And for a moment she feels herself calm just a little, before she realises that his other hand has wrapped around the handle of his gun and has drawn it up out of its holster, ready for if the noisy, destructive sounding group outside decides to come their way.

Closing her eyes, she clutches his hand and tries to get her breathing under control and feels a rush of relief flood through her as she hears the voices beyond start to quieten and fade as their owners start to move away from them. Arching her head back to rest on the shelves behind them she feels a smile brush over her lips and a faintly hysterical laugh bubble up in her chest as she finds herself able to breathe again.

Kane looks intensely relieved as well and offers her a hand to help draw her to her feet, which she accepts, and turns to start re-examining her shelves, still a little grumpy about the runaway bottles that have scattered all over the floor, even though she knows there’s a good reason for that.

Reaching up, she goes to lift another little tub from the shelves when the door bangs open behind them and her heart stops dead in her chest as though the crack of the door hitting against the wall was the sound of a bullet bursting from the barrel of a gun and plunging into her heart, killing it on contact.

This time, Kane all but crushes her beneath him as he bulls in to her, pushing her to the ground and into a corner of the little room they’re trapped in, shielding her body with his own, covering her mouth with his hand to keep her quiet, but he needn’t have bothered, as it is she can barely breathe never mind make a sound, apart from the deafening pounding of her pulse thundering in her ears.

Her eyes meet Kane’s as wide and fearful, reflecting all of the fear she knows he must see in her own.

Silence descends over the little store. Dense and thick, congealing as its left to stew, waiting to be cut.

Neither of them does the honour, and instead a cruel, deep male voice says, “What was that?”

She feels herself gasp into Kane’s hand and he tightens it, pulling her in closer against him, his whole body shaking and taut beside her. They both know that they must have seen something, a flash of movement, a blur of motion, something.

The sound of bottles being wrenched off of shelves and unceremoniously collected up in a bag hits them next, but it’s not loud enough to cover the soft sounds of someone moving closer and closer and closer and the soft, terrifying metallic click as a gun is cocked.

Her fingers wind tightly around the front of his jacket, pulling him in closer to him as the sound of footsteps gets nearer and nearer, interrupted only by the occasional loud crash that sounds deafening in the taut silence that’s stretching on unbearably as he kicks things aside to clear a path to them.

A part of her just wants to stand up and scream and tell them where she is and make it stop, get it over with, anything but this torturous creeping closer and closer and closer every second that’s winding her up and fraying ever nerve well past breaking point. And she knows it’s stupid and reckless and all she’s likely to get for her troubles is a bullet between her eyes, because she has no doubt at all that the people who have stumbled across them are of the ‘shoot first ask questions later’ variety, but she can’t help herself, it’s driving her to distraction. Her hands have curled into tight fists, her nails digging into her palms and she just wants it all to be done.

Kane’s sudden, subtle movement distracts her however and, pressing a finger to his lips to keep her quiet, he beckons her to follow him. Thinking he’s mad, but wanting, _needing_ , to do something other than just sit here and wait to be slaughtered like bird trapped helpless in a cage and cautiously follows him, staying as low as him as he starts edging slowly back and back, nearer to the door which opens out onto, what she’s praying, is an emergency exit.

Inch by inch they creep back and back and back as the intruder moves nearer and nearer to them. Kane puts a hand in front of her when she hits the break in the counter that will free them from their cage, waiting, waiting for some opportunity that seems unlikely ever to come.

They hover on the fringes of escape and confinement, of hope and hopeless, of life and death, balanced on the knife’s edge, not daring to move for fear of falling but not daring to stay either for fear of being cut to ribbons.

The decision is made abruptly for them when a shelf above them explodes, raining bottles and pills of all different shapes and sizes down on top of them when they’re struck by a stray bullet that was meant to find flesh not plastic.

Kane shoves her forwards in front of him and she doesn’t hesitate but plunges through the gap, stumbling on and out of the door, hearing someone curse behind them, and then hearing him start to return fire, covering them as they push their way out of the back.

For a heart stopping moment she’s sure she’s lost him but when she turns, reaching back, his fingers close over hers and his other hand pushes between her shoulder blades as he urges in a taut, desperate hiss, “ _Run_.”

****


	9. Part 9 - The Knife's Edge

_Part 9 – The Knife’s Edge_

Blood pounds against her ears, a thundering cacophony that seems to be rising in sound and ferocity as they burst out of the back of the crowded little storeroom at the back of the pharmacy that had been impossibly cluttered and had taken what felt like a terrifying age to manage to navigate through and out into the blazing sunlight that spills over the town they’ve just crashed into the middle of.

Her heart is hammering in her chest, feeling as though it’s battering against her ribs like an insect trapped in a glass jar, thudding repeatedly into the walls that surround it, trying as desperately as it is hopelessly to free itself from its prison. Her lungs are panting and heaving, trying to force enough oxygen into her body to sustain her but between their urgent, full tilt flight and the terror that shocks through her body and the adrenaline that’s forced into her system, she isn’t surprised she’s finding it harder and harder to breathe.

Before she can dwell too long on the beating of her heart or the pain that’s firing through her burning lungs though, she feels his nails scrabble at the back of her hand as he grabs it again and pulls her off after him. She has no idea what destination he has in mind or where he’s leading her but she stumbles off behind him, breaking into another run a moment later, still hand in hand with him, without question, trusting him to find them some refuge, to keep them safe, to save her life as he did before.

In the end, Kane’s refuge turns out to be a small, twisted alley when, hurtling down the main street, they nearly run into the backs of another four or five members of the same group that cornered them in the pharmacy. The town is full of them, so it seems. They’re utterly outnumbered and out gunned. And they’re surrounded.

Pulling her down behind some overflowing bins and sending a scrawny little dog scampering away in fright at the sound of their approach, he presses her into the wall behind them, motioning for her to be quiet while he peers around the edge to see if they were followed down into this street.

A few seconds later, he seems satisfied that they weren’t and the gun that’s still in his hand and hot from the bullets he had fired back at their pursuers lowers slightly as he turns to her, a set and stubborn expression on her face that makes her tense and causes yet another little trickle of fear to shiver along her spine, like a plucked string.

“There are too many of them.” She says wildly, half suspecting from the look on his face that he wants to try and tackle them himself and try and fight their way through, which she knows is a plan nothing short of suicidal.

“I know.” He answers, giving the top of her arm a gentle squeeze, which is when she realises how pale she must be and how violently she’s shaking. “And there are too many, and they’re too spread out for us to hope to slip away together.”

Her attention is caught entirely by that last word ‘together’ and suddenly a thought hits her and she opens her mouth to tell him no, but before she can cut in, he’s continued talking and has cut across her, more loudly and surely than her soft squeak of protest.

“They don’t know how many we are, for all they know, there’s just one of us.” He tells her, and her worry turns to certainty, “If I go out there alone, they’ll come after me, all of them, and that will give you the distraction you need to get out and-“

“No.” She growls flatly back at him, aggressively shaking her head and glaring at him, daring him to try and keep pushing down this path. Which of course he does.

“We don’t have any other options.” He snaps back at her, “If we stay here we’ll die, it’s only a matter of time until they find us. They’ll take all of the supplies we’ve gathered and then they’ll kill us.”

“So we don’t stay here.” She snarls fiercely, knowing that that isn’t an option as much as he does.

“If we run, if we run together, they’ll come after us, they’ll catch us, they’ll kill us.” He tells her flatly, his voice remaining terrifyingly neutral.

“And so instead, your plan is to run yourself and get yourself killed-“ She spits furiously at him.

“So that you can live.” He interrupts calmly. 

“No.” She hisses again, fury currently overtaking her fear and making her deaf to the urgent panic still fluttering in her chest and twisting her stomach that wants her to go, that wants to run, “I’m not living on time I’ve borrowed from the death of another person.” She tells him furiously, gripping his arm when he opens his mouth to argue again, “From time borrowed from the death of a friend.” She says, laying enough emphasis on the last word to give him pause.

His lips quirk in a faint, humourless smile, “Careful, Abby, you almost sound like you care about me.”

“Because I do.” She snarls back impulsively, and so furiously that he freezes, blinking at her, surprised by the firm conviction in her voice. “You’re, you’re useful to the group.” She adds, deciding that if he wants to go down the path of cold, clipped logic then she can throw that back in his face and see how he likes it, “We need you. _I_ need you.”

“They won’t have me, or you, if we don’t do this.” He growls back at her, his own temper beginning to flare and fray now, hating this situation as much as she does, and arguing his position with just as much furious stubbornness as her, with a pinch of heedless recklessness thrown in as well for good measure.

“I still owe you from the last time you saved my life.” She says desperately, grabbing at his arm in terror fuelled strength as he begins to rise and move away from her, “If anyone goes, if anyone tries to distract them, it should be me.”

“No.” His tone implies there’s no point in arguing with that, and his eyes flash dangerously at the merest suggestion, “I have the gun.” He tells her, his tone softening just a little, but still with the same steely edge, “And I know this area better than you do. I’ll have a better chance of slipping away from them and surviving.”

“I can’t let you do this.” She whispers desperately, grabbing at his wrist, fingers scrabbling, her nails digging in hard enough to draw blood as she tries to make him stay, to see sense, “I won’t.” She snarls as fiercely as she can, as though if she says it hard enough and firmly enough, it’ll just become true, and that he might actually listen to her for once.

A soft, sad smile brushes over his lips at that and he shakes his head, raising the gun again and securing it in his grip, “I’m not asking you for your permission, Abby. I’m telling you that I’m going to run out there, fire a shot and-“

“ _No_.” She snaps again, furiously shaking her head, refusing point blank to let go of him, “No, it can’t be this, there has to be another way.”

“There isn’t.” He says, shaking his head, “You know that.” He murmurs quietly, “You know that this is our only option you just don’t like it-“

“Of course I don’t, it’s suicide, you’ll be killing yourself so that I can live, I-“ She breaks in desperately, her tone begin to waver and blur the lines into hysteria.

“I’m not asking you to like it.” He growls back, clearly growing impatient with protestations that he didn’t seem to have expected at the outset of this plan, “I’m just asking you to know that it’s the only way.”

“It’s not.” She says, “I don’t know what else we can do,” She interrupts him as he opens his mouth to voice that very complaint, to demand an alternative that he knows she doesn’t have, “But it can’t be this, it can’t have come down to this, I’m not going to let you sacrifice yourself for me.”

His expression softens at her words and he reaches out, tenderly brushing her cheek with the back of his hand, “I have to.” He murmurs quietly, “It’s the only chance you have of making it out of this alive.”

“I want us _both_ to have a chance to make it out of this alive.” She whispers furiously at him, trying not to let him hear her voice breaking at that, though the flicker in his eyes tells her he has.

Shaking his head he says softly, “There’s not. You know there’s not. I have to do this.”

“You don’t, you can’t-“ She stammers hopelessly, knowing from the sickening, plummeting sensation in her chest that he’s going to, whatever she says.

“When I run out there, you’ll hear a shot, wait a minute, no more than that, then you run in the other direction.” He whispers to her, firmly gripping her shoulder, “You run and you don’t look back.”

She stares at him, uncomprehending, even more so when she watches him load a small pistol and shove it into her hand, “Take this.” He says shortly, clearly no longer in the mood for arguments as he bulls over her when she tries to feebly protest. He bends her fingers into place around it, showing her how to hold it and then guides her through how to take the safety off, and makes her do it again for him so he can see she knows how. “If you need to, use it.” He tells her firmly, his eyes blazing, “Promise me you’ll use it if you need to.” He whispers, seeming to know what she’s feeling, the revulsion that’s rising up in her at the very thought, “These men, if they catch you, they won’t just put a bullet in your head the way a Synth would.” He hisses urgently, “They’ll hurt you. Badly. And then they won’t hesitate to kill you when they’re done so you can’t hesitate either, you can’t, Abby. Promise me, promise you won’t hesitate, promise me you’ll pull the trigger. _Promise me.”_

“I, I-“ She stammers, her hand shaking, still clutched around the pistol. He gives her a little shake, his eyes more full of fear now than she’s ever seen them before and she finds herself nodding, “I promise.”

Satisfied at that, nodding, he stands up and begins to walk towards the exit of the alley and she finds herself propelling herself forwards into him, “Marcus.” She breathes and he turns to her, a strange cast to his eyes as he looks at her, “Marcus, please don’t do this.” She whispers desperately, hopelessly, “Please, we can find another way, it doesn’t have to be this.”

“Yes.” He murmurs back, “It does.” She opens her mouth again but he cuts her off, shaking his head, “I’ve made my decision, Abby.” He tells her flatly.

Then, without warning, he breaks away from her and runs, not giving her a chance to call after him or grab him and stop him and beg him to find another way with her. He runs from her, leaving her standing shell-shocked and alone in the little alley, her heart pounding and then stopping when she hears the promised shot fired into the air and she knows there’s no going back and stopping him now. And her world has gone dark again.

****

He barrels out onto the main street again, leaving Abby standing alone in the alley, with the pistol he had given her still gripped tightly in her hands. He prays that she won’t have to use it. He prays that this ruse works, that they take him to be the only one, that they all come after him, that they ignore her, forget her, never think to look for her or follow her.

When he spills out onto the street again, the small amount of shelter that the tall alley walls had been providing him vanishes and he finds himself bathed in the baking sun and left feeling like he’s standing in a furnace. Within seconds, sweat begins to bead over his skin. His heart hammers so hard he thinks it’s going to burst and send him to his knees here before he ever has a chance to lead them away and let her escape. Adrenaline thunders through his veins, so much, too much, heightening every sense, making him ready, ready to shoot, to kill, whatever he has to do to draw them off.

He’s only ever felt like this once before in his life. Years before all of this. The day his partner died, that day they were both shot on the job. It had felt like the world was ending that day. It had felt as though they had stumbled into a warzone. But they weren’t ready, they weren’t trained for that, they weren’t prepared for that. Adrenaline had coursed through his system then, keeping him standing, keeping him shooting, keeping him fighting and keeping him conscious long enough to radio for help.

They had come for him. They had found him alive. They had taken him to hospital and in the end, all he had to show for what had happened was a ghastly scar and memories that haunted every dream and waking second for months afterwards. It still haunted him. The look on her face, the blood that had streamed between his fingers as he had tried to staunch a wound that had already killed her, the light dying in her eyes. He hadn’t been able to save her. But he would save Abby. Whatever it took, whatever it cost him, he would save her.

Fortune or misfortune, he never knows which, touches him when he looks around him and sees the two men who had entered the pharmacy and shot at them and he seizes the chance without hesitation, firing off the shot he had promised to Abby.

He had always been a good shot, even under pressure, even with sweat in his eyes half blinding him and the sun trying to finish the job shining above, and his bullet lodges itself in their would-be pursuers calf with a spurt of blood that he knows, a moment before with her by his side, would have been scarlet.

He doesn’t stop to ponder its colour now as he hears bullets answer that one, and a ragged cry that seems to echo in half a thousand voices, he just turns, he just runs. Runs away from Abby, from the safety of the camp, from the little group of people he had somehow managed to find and be with, runs away from all of it, runs back to what he was before them, to who he was, who he needs to be to make it through this.

She’ll run. He know she will. She won’t linger there for the sake of pride or stubbornness or anything else. She won’t waste this chance that he’s given her. She’s smart and she’s quick, she’ll seize the chance that he’s given her, she’ll curse him for it until the end of her days, but she’ll take it. She thinks he’s died to give her this chance, thinks that he’s a good as gone, that that bullet he fired off may as well have plunged into his heart.

And maybe she’s right. Maybe this will be the end of him. Maybe this is the end of the line, the end of his luck, the end of his life. But she’ll still run, and she’ll get away, she’ll make it. And so he prays, not for himself, not for some miracle that will save him as the hounds of Hell seem to blaze along his trail sniffing for blood, his blood, but for her, he prays for her, that she makes it and that it was worth it.

This is why he’s doing this. this is why he’s running again. This is why he’s being hunted again. This is why he’s alone again, with nothing but his shadow and the few bullets he has left for company and protection. For her. _For her._ As long as she gets away, as long as she makes it, as long as she makes it back to her people, back home, it’ll be worth it, and so he insists to himself, it’ll be worth it for her.

****

The shot, the signal runs out, followed by a deafening, terrifying cry of fury and alarm both, and she flattens herself against the cold brick wall behind her that a moment ago was red but now looks black.

Closing her eyes and trying to steady herself and breathe, she waits a moment then pads cautiously to the opening of the alley, the gun he had given her still pressed between her fingers that have become slick with sweat.

Cautiously, heart in her mouth, she peers out around the edge of the wall, looking up and down the narrow street. It looks completely clear, his plan had obviously worked, and now they were all coming for him, forgetting her, perhaps not even knowing that she had existed, too consumed with thoughts of catching him to worry about checking the place he had emerged from; if they had seen that at all.

Not knowing if she should bless him or curse him for all of this, she does as he told her to instead. She hadn’t wanted him to do this for her, she had never asked him to die for her, she had begged him not to, but he had made his decision, and taken hers away from her, she isn’t going to waste his life, his sacrifice cowering her, waiting and worrying.

Steeling herself, she summons up what little courage this world has left to her and turns back the way they had originally come in to this town, this damn town, talking quietly, almost animatedly. She had been so full of hope, happy to think that they might be gathering the supplies she had been worrying over for weeks, glad to be thinking that perhaps their luck had taken a turn for the better, that things might finally be starting to go her way, the tides turning, the thumb that she was under lifting just a little to let her breathe, let her hope.

 But just as soon as it had come it had been wrenched away, and far from being back to square one, she felt as though she had been pushed back beyond even that. A riptide current, always stirring just below the surface, had grabbed at her and pulled her back in to drown again in the dark and in the cold, the second she had lowered her guard, had dared to have a reason to smile or to laugh, now he was gone.

Pounding all of her fury and her frustration into the ground instead of screaming, she forces it into her steps, into her lengthening strides as she breaks and begins to run, doing as he’d begged and refusing to look back, focused entirely on her way out, heading for the gap between the broken down, crumbling houses that they had entered in through this morning, where she knows that just beyond is her way out, her hope, her chance to get back to her people, her only chance.

So intent on running, on getting out of this godforsaken ghost town and back to the relative safety and comfort and familiarity of camp, that she doesn’t look to either side of her and is too late to stop or evade when she finally catches the hulking black shape to her left, the flicker of movement that comes an instant before the collision as someone’s arms wrap tightly around her.

A foul smell of decay and old sour wine assaults her senses as she begins to struggle furiously in his grasp, that only serves to tighten to the point that her eyes begin to water in pain and she struggles just to breathe. Screaming in fury and frustration, she summons a burst of strength she never knew she had and slams her heel down into his instep as hard as she can.

He grunts in agony and reels, and his grip loosens, almost enough for her to escape, to get away, but then his hold on her redoubles in strength and she gasps hopelessly, wanting to scream for help but knowing that no-one will hear her.

She starts to think of begging, of pleading for her life, of telling him he can take the supplies in her pack if only he lets her go when with one hand he wrenches back her head by the hair and she feels the cold blade of a knife, sharp and ragged and cruel, pressed against her throat. A harsh voice growls for her to stop struggling and stay still and she obeys, terrified, going limp against him.

For a fraction of a second, she forgets the promise she had given Marcus just before he left her, when he had pressed the gun into her hand, which is now unrestrained and free, the small pistol concealed in a fist that her captor had never thought to check and has now left unchecked, one hand too busy with his knife and the other full of her hair.

Her fingers scrabble for a moment, as terror seizes her when he presses the knife a little harder against her skin and it splits like a river bursting its banks. She feels a small bead of hot blood slowly trickle out from under the blade and her eyes roll up, trying to look at her captor, to see the look in his eyes, to see how far he means to press that blade into her neck. She doesn’t need to look though, she doesn’t need to see the stripped, raw cruelty in his eyes to know; Marcus’ words come back to her then and she’s sure, so sure that the arms that encircle her belong to death.

 But then, just as she begins to panic and feel bile rise in the back of her throat in terror, she feels the safety click off of the gun in her hands and she brandishes it behind her, pressing it back sharply until the barrel finds flesh and then she pulls the trigger as hard as she can and feels it explode in her hands.

Everything seems to happen in slow motion then. The bullet makes contact with some part of her attacker, judging by his sudden scream and the way he drops his knife, violently wrenching away from her. A warm spray of blood spatters against her clothes and her skin and shock freezes her in place for a heartbeat.

Then the man holding her drops to the ground and everything snaps back to speed, now feeling as though it’s rushing past her at a hundred miles an hour. Somehow she finds herself holding the gun in one hand and the short, rather rusty, wicked little dagger that had drawn blood from her throat clutched in the other.

She stares for a moment, transfixed by the sight of blood pulsing from a wound in her would-be captor’s thigh but then his shouts and the answering cry of someone deeper in the town, hidden in one of the alleyways that had concealed her and Marcus before he had left her jolts her back to her senses and fear constricts her throat so much so that for one, wild moment, she thinks it really has been split open down to the bone.

Turning on her heel, she plunges through the gap in the houses, running as fast as she can, stumbling and staggering, half blinded by tears and terror, but forcing herself to go on, adrenaline still thundering through her veins, giving her the strength to keep going, the thought of Marcus giving her the will. She has to make it back to camp, she thinks, vague and desperate all at once, she has to make it back, she has to make it home or else it was all for nothing, or else she shot that brute for nothing, or else Marcus risked his life, and possibly, she tries so hard not to think probably, lost it, she has to make it back for him, for him...

****


	10. Part 10 - Blood On My Name

_Part – 10 – Blood On My Name_

When she finally makes it back up over the top of the hill and staggers towards their little camp, relief courses through her veins, displacing the adrenaline that had been the only thing keeping her going for a while now and making her legs tremble so badly she thinks she’s going to collapse on the spot, even as Lincoln and Octavia spot her and hurry over.

Allowing Lincoln to support her once they get near enough, as Octavia peers into her eyes and gives her  a quick once over, clearly concerned, she can understand the look that passes between the two of them.

 The picture of reassuring confidence they might usually expect from their leader is definitely missing from her right now. Her clothes are torn and bloody, some of it her own, most of it from the man she had shot to get out of that town. Tiny ribbons of dried blood still spider web out over her throat. Her hands are crusted with dirt and blood from the number of times she had grabbed desperately onto nearby tree branches and sharp, rough rocks to stop herself losing her feet, or to break a fall when she did scrambling up the steep incline that was the fastest way to get home, and the only one open to her with darkness beginning to swallow the world as the sun dipped down lower and lower beneath the horizon. She’s sure that she’s pale and drawn and haggard looking as well. All in all, not at all what they would have expected from a fairly routine supply run.

“What happened?” Octavia demands as they start leading her back in towards the heart of camp and the warmth of the fire that someone has managed to get going, their tents grouped around it. “You were gone for so long, we knew something must have gone wrong to keep you.” Octavia pushes, her voice gentle but her eyes full of the urgency she knows worry will bring on.

As the firelight ripples over her when Lincoln lowers her down onto a relatively flat stone beside it, she hears the sharp intake of breath from Octavia and sees her exchange a significant glance with Lincoln before she demands, a note of definite panic in her voice, “Is that blood?”

The fire flickers and dances in front of her, white and pale grey, occasionally tossing up hot, impossibly bright sparks, the logs in its heart bursting and exploding and making her start every time, even though she should be well used to the sound by now, but it feels too loud, to intrusive, and her nerves are too frayed and shattered to stand it.

Distantly, from what feels like a hundred miles away and a thousand lifetimes ago, she’s dimly aware of Octavia still asking her questions, questions that she doesn’t even know where to begin to answer, “Where did you the gun?” She asks, shocked, and she understands her shock, since up to the point that Marcus had forced the pistol into her hands in that alleyway and made her promise him that she would use it if she needed to, she had barely so much as held one, much less kept it clutched between her fingers like a precious, delicate prize.

After a few seconds of silence that stretches to the point that it becomes obvious that no answer isn’t forthcoming, Octavia crouches down in front of her and asks softly, “Where’s Kane? He didn’t come back with you?”

A faint shiver whispers through her at the sound of his name and instead of trying to find some words to answer she just shakes her head, feeling herself starting to tremble all over. Covering her face with her hands, she tries to block everything out for a moment and pull herself back together, vaguely aware of Lincoln gently drawing Octavia away and murmuring to her.

When she looks up again, Lincoln is waiting, watching her carefully and she sighs heavily, dragging her fingers through her hair she tries to force a reassuring smile she thinks ends up more as a pained grimace and insist tremulously, “I’m okay.”

“No,” Lincoln murmurs quietly to her, shaking his head, his voice gentle but still firm and certain for all that, “You’re not.”

Her eyes meet his and she feels herself tremble again and she knows he’s right. She’s not okay. She’s the furthest from okay. And after what she’s been through, she knows that’s only right, that that makes sense, that she shouldn’t be okay, that no-one should be able to see the things she saw and do the things that she was forced to do and come out the other end and be okay. But saying that, projecting that, forcing everyone else around her to believe that and slowly coming to delude herself of the same idea, is the only thing that’s gotten her through all of this since Jake’s death.

Taking a deep breath she pushes herself up and sways alarmingly on the spot until Lincoln quickly catches her then half supports, half carries her back towards the relative privacy of her tent. A part of her wants to sink down onto her bed and bury herself in the covers until she wastes away. But another part never wants to sleep again, for fear of the dreams that would come stalking in to her mind, the thoughts that pounded against her every second she was awake that she spent every moment fighting back, allowed in to torment her the instant she let her guard down.

She does crave the comfort of being alone right now though. She’s tired, she’s so tired. She wants to be left in peace. She wants them all to leave. She wants them all to stop, with their questions and their quiet words and the pity behind their eyes. She wants everything to stop. Just for a second. Just for a second she wants to be something that isn’t strong, she wants to shatter, she wants to break, she wants to cry. She wants to go back to a world that never made her feel like this. She wants this all to be over once and for all. She wants to feel safe. She longs to feel safe again. She longs to have a day, an hour, a minute, that’s not spent constantly looking over her shoulder, terrified, wondering what she’s going to wake up to the next morning, or if she’s going to wake up at all. She wants to go back.

Lincoln gives her shoulder a soft squeeze as he lowers her carefully down onto the edge of her bed, glancing over his shoulder as Octavia ducks in after them, a med kit in one hand, a look of concern still in firmly set on her face as she moves in closer.

Somehow, she manages to find her voice again to tell her weakly, “I’m not hurt, I don’t need that.” She’s shaken, and exhausted, but has relatively few injuries to boast of for the day’s events, and none that require any serious, immediate attention.

“The blood-“ Octavia begins, looking startled and glancing up at Lincoln, worried.

Feeling exhausted and as though she’s lived a hundred lifetimes forced the span of one, she shakes her head, “It’s not mine.” She says shakily, unable to say more without bracing herself a little more.

She catches the stricken look on Octavia’s face a moment before she says, “Kane’s?”

Abby opens her mouth to tell her that no, his blood might be staining her soul, but not her clothes and skin, but before she can muster up any sort of response that is both reassuring but without disguising the painful truth of what’s happened the past few days, the tent bursts open behind them and Bellamy and Raven hurry in, taking in the scene around them in a few quick glances, assessing the damage.

It’s Bellamy who breaks the tense silence, looking straight at her and demanding bluntly, “What the Hell happened out there?”

Somehow, the stark bluntness of the question jolts her back to herself, and she finds herself straightening up, feeling a little more alert and starting to tell them all, as steadily and coherently as she can, what happened, from the moment they left camp, the walk down into the town, the stores that they hit, the supplies they managed to gather, the pharmacy, the way they managed to get out, Marcus tearing off to cause a distraction to let her escape, even the man who assaulted her as she was leaving and the bullet she had fired into his thigh to force him to release her, explaining the blood that spatters her even now, all of it, giving them as much detail as she can bear, snippets of the day flashing in front of her, her heart racing and her chest constricting at various points during the tale.

But they’re patient and quiet and supportive. None of them interrupts to ask questions or tries to push her on when she has to pause, sometimes for minutes at a time, to get herself under control again before she can bring herself to go on with her story.

Finally, when she’s finished, after a long silence, Raven breaks it, her voice sounding almost too loud, low and soft as it is when she says, “So, Kane...”

She lets the statement hang in the air so long it becomes a question, one that she has no idea how to answer, but that she knows she can’t avoid. Looking up, she meets Raven’s eyes when she answers hollowly, “I don’t know.”

The implication in those words, the fear behind the question, and the answer, the thing that they’re all thinking, but not saying echoes through the silence that suddenly feels suffocating and oppressive in light of this and she rubs at her temples with the tips of her fingers, acutely aware of the fact that she’s trembling again, despite the relative warmth of her tent and the comfort and company of having her family around her again. Drained and exhausted, she doesn’t know what she wants to do, or what she should do, she just feels hopeless and lost.

Fortunately, the others seem to want to keep busy and take it upon themselves to examine the packs she had somehow managed to keep with her all the way back and, after checking with her, they lift them out of her tent and carry them outside to sort out what she’s managed to gather and then divide them up evenly among the bags each of them carry.

To her slight surprise, Lincoln stays with her rather than following the others out. After a few wordless moments when her not sending him away seems enough for him to qualify invitation to stay, or at the very least an acceptance of his presence, he seems to settle a little and moves away from her, rummaging in the med kit that Octavia had brought.

Unsticking her tight throat she tells him hoarsely, her voice almost as fatigued as she feels, “I told Octavia, I’m not hurt, I-“

Breaking off when she sees the little bottle of saline in his hand along with a small kidney dish and some cotton balls, she realises what he’s intending to do. Absently, she glances down at her hands again, both of which are spattered with blood, and one of which is covered, the hand that held the gun and caught the worst of spray of blood that pulsed over her hand from the artery her bullet had undoubtedly ruptured. A part of her had almost forgotten what they were stained with, and how badly.

All at once, bile rises in the back of her throat and she knows he’s right and she needs to get rid of it, now. A hopeless, hysterical little laugh bubbles up inside her chest as she grabs at one of the cotton tufts and dunks it in the saline Lincoln has emptied into the dish he perches on the bed between them, at the thought of her having to literally wash the blood from her hands and that’s almost enough to cause her to break down completely.

Somehow though, she manages to shakily squeeze out the cotton and start furiously attacking the dark stains on her fingers, finding to her relief that the black spots wash out much more easily than she had expected. The water bowl becomes dyed, what she supposes must be pink, but just looks white to her, as she dunks her wad of cotton back in to, tainted by the blood of the man who’s name she had never even known, and Marcus’ too, which is proving much harder to remove.

After a few cautious glances in her direction, Lincoln starts to wash her other hand when she has the left clean without a word. Gratitude wells up in her at that, she can’t handle more interrogation, or even some scattered quiet words just now, which she knows she would have been peppered with had any of the others stayed to help her. But he seems to understand that she doesn’t want to talk just now, that she can’t, and that she doesn’t want to listen either, she just wants to rid herself of all memory and evidence of what had happened to her today, and he quietly helps her with that task.

It takes a while to completely rid her right hand and return to it something that looks almost normal again, but once he’s finished that she finds her tongue again, “Thank you.” She murmurs softly as he goes to wash out the cotton he had been using in the dish that’s very quickly moving from white swirls to an overall grey tint with all of the blood that’s been washed into it.

Lincoln nods and meets her eyes again, having her tilt her chin up a little so he can inspect the cut on her throat. It’s wide, but so shallow it’s barely above a paper cut, and worth about as little notice, but when he starts very gently working away the thin tendrils of blood that have seeped from it and dried on her skin, she knows he’s right and that it needs to be cleaned out properly.

Sitting as still as she can, she stares above Lincoln’s head at nothing in particular, trying to distract herself from the crescendo of thoughts that are bursting through her mind one after the other, without pausing to give her any respite, beginning to make her head pound.

However, this time, Lincoln speaks up, his voice soft and low, but clear and strong in the quiet, his eyes meeting hers as he says, “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t-“ She begins, blinking at him, not knowing what he means exactly, the shooting she thinks, but then he goes on.

“What Kane did, going first to give you a chance, that wasn’t your fault.” He says, startling her by pin-pointing her fears and her guilt so much that it shocks her into silence, letting him continue evenly, “He made his choice, you can’t be held accountable to that, you can’t blame yourself for his decision.

“But he made it for me.” She whispers tremulously, staring down at Lincoln, clutching onto his words the way a drowning man would cling to wreckage to keep himself afloat, adrift and alone in storm tossed seas, “He only did that for me, so that I could get away.”

Lincoln nods slowly, reaching up and gently starting to wipe the blood from her throat again, “So be grateful for what he did.” He murmurs, glancing up at her every few moments to gauge her reaction, “Remember him, remember what he did, thank him for it.” His tone becomes a little sharper at his next words, “But don’t blame yourself. You tried everything you could to find a way for you both to get out of there and back here, everyone here knows it, he knows it. He was right though, that was the only way either of you was ever going to get away. You can’t feel guilty for him doing what he thought was the right thing, for doing what he thought he had to do. For himself as well as you.”

Blinking up at him in confusion, her attention caught by those last few words, “For himself?” She echoes dazedly, not understanding, “He got himself killed, sacrificed himself to let me escape, none of that was for himself.”

Lincoln’s eyes glitter darkly as he looks up at her and murmurs quietly, “Everyone has a past, Abby. And in this world, with the way that it is, that’s not always something that they’re proud of.” He lets the implication behind that hang unsaid but she understands all the same.

“And you don’t know for sure that they caught him.” Lincoln adds, his tone a little more bracing now, “He knows this place pretty well,” He points out, gesturing vaguely around them, “And someone on their own, who knows the land, he might have a chance too, Abby. He’s tough. He might find his way back to you after all.”

Nodding vaguely, she gives his hand a gentle squeeze as he finishes up and hoarsely thanks him again, then asks him if he can have the others give her a little while to herself. Lincoln nods and promises that no-one will disturb her again until she comes back to them, then tells her she should try and get some sleep, she’s exhausted, and she’s been through a lot. Smiling faintly, she tells him that she’ll try and thanks him again as he withdraws, leaving her alone in her tent, swaying slightly on the edge of her makeshift bed.

The silence presses in oppressively around her, like a shroud, and the dim light inside the tent adds to the overwhelming urge her body is pressing onto her brain to shut down and rest, to close her eyes and let sleep take her for a few hours, to drift in darkness and in dreams and not have to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders for even a little while, seems like the most enticing prospect that’s crossed her mind since the apocalypse began.

But another part of her whispers that she won’t be able to sleep, that she’s been through too much, and that as exhausted as she is, and as much as she wants to slip away for even a little while and indulge in the respite that sleep can bring, she knows it won’t be that simple.

If she lets herself drift off, she knows she’ll have to relive it all, everything that she saw, the terror in the pharmacy, the pill bottles rolling away across the floor as Marcus pulls her to the ground, the bullets that screamed above them and the tablets that rained down upon them as they ran and ran and ran.

Crouching down in that alleyway, grabbing hold of his hand and begging him not to do what he wanted to do to save her, telling him there had to be another way, that they would find another way, that he didn’t have to do this, that she didn’t want him to leave her alone again.

The last glimpse she had of him, breaking away from her and running, the sound of the shot that signalled to her that he had gone through with it and there was no way for her to change his mind, to find another way, it was done, and now she had to go, she had to do as he’d asked, she had to run for her life, run like all the ghosts that haunted her at night were there and chasing her on.

The making of new ghosts to stalk her dreams at night. The man that had grabbed her inches from the gate, inches from the point at which she would have been safe. The cold bite of the knife at her throat. The warm spray of blood when she forced a bullet into his thigh. The way he had screamed. The way she had trembled. Then running again, running, running, running, never looking back, the way he had told her.

And she knew that that wouldn’t be all. She knew that if she let it, her mind would rear up and force on her all of the things she thought had happened that day. That she would see Marcus running from her, running for his life, and to buy hers. The terror that would take over him as he ran, the monsters she had left in that town on his heels, chasing him, hunting him, hurting him, _killing_ him.

Whatever Lincoln had said, and however much she might have believed him and longed to believe him, she knows that she hadn’t done enough. She should have stopped him, she shouldn’t have let him go through with it, she should have screamed and begged and pleaded with him, she should have done whatever it took to stop him, she should have insisted that they die together rather than forcing her to live with the knowledge of what every breath, every heartbeat costs her, that memory constantly ringing in her ears, she should have done more, she should have saved him.

Without her permission, silent tears are rolling from her eyes. For what she did today, however necessary it might have been. And for what she’s lost, for _who_ she lost. Somehow, she finds herself lying flat out on her bed, clutching a pillow to her chest, shaking with the weight of her grief, of her guilt, of the horror that is living, where even breathing feels wrong and full of pain and blood and ash. 

Her eyes are closing, screwing up against her tears and against her grief and her body gradually begins to stop its shaking as the last reserves of her strength finally give out and force her into the sleep she had so dreaded but can’t fight a second longer.

****

When she wakes again, it’s all in darkness, and she doesn’t know if she’s slept for days or if she’s only closed her eyes for a few seconds. Her respite had been brief and restless, spent tossing and turning, murmuring and occasionally crying out, but, mercifully, she can barely remember more than fragments of the dream and something else happens to distract her entirely and focus her on something else.

Octavia hurries over to her as she’s pushing herself up and rubbing the last bits of sleep from her eyes, trying to get her bearings again. Crouching down beside her, looking more than a little harried, she opens her mouth to say something but before she can Abby asks blearily, “How long was I out?” 

“The whole day.” Octavia replies tersely, “It’s night again, I was going to come and wake you anyway in a couple of hours so you could eat something but-“

She finally registers the tone and the look in her eyes, “But what?” She demands sharply, pushing herself up and out of bed, “What’s happened?”

All she says by way of answer to that is an ominous, “We’re not alone.”

When she pushes out of the tent, cold night air slaps against her cheeks, and she begins to feel a little more alert and like herself again, something only a crisis can bring out of her. Bellamy and Raven are standing sentry at the boundary of their camp, Raven with binoculars she had rigged up to work at night and give them a clear view of what they’re facing, let them scout ahead in occasions such as this, Bellamy has a rifle on his shoulder, peering down the sights, taking quiet, murmured directions from Raven at his side.

“What is it?” Abby asks quietly, moving in to stand beside Raven, peering out into the gloom and trying to make out the source of all this trouble.

They have a protocol in place for what happens if they’re attacked during the night, or even if they’re just threatened by a group of Synths coming on them by chance. A fright and severe shock to the system one of their first nights had stopped them from sleeping idly without having at least one, preferably two people kept up on watch, ready to rouse the others and pack things up to move on at a moment’s notice. It isn’t so serious that anyone has started throwing things into packs so it can’t be that bad, but it’s still something to have them rattled like this.

“It only looks like one.” Raven reports quietly, adjusting the focus and squinting a little, “There could be more but-“

She cuts off, her words interrupted by a call from whoever is coming upon them, a figure that Abby can make out as well now, night vision or no night vision, a small black outline, hands raised in a gesture of surrender, and the words filter back to her in the darkness, “Don’t shoot!”

A sharp intake of breath cuts off her reply and she pushes the barrel of Bellamy’s rifle down as she pushes past him, ignoring him when he tries to tell her that it’s not safe, not having recognised the voice the way that she had, the way that sends her stumbling forwards, past the line that marks the perimeter of their little camp and out into the forest to greet him.

They meet half way along the path that she herself had walked along hours and hours before to return to them, and she doesn’t stop to think or hesitate or consider that everyone is standing at the boundary watching her when she finally collides with him, she wraps her arms around him and hugs him.

He looks a little worse for wear, his clothes are torn in several places and most of the skin that she can see is bruised, cut or bloodied in some way, but he was strong enough to make it all the way back to them and only crumples a little when she puts her arms around him. She feels him tense a little in surprise at the gesture, before some instinct seems to take over and makes him tenderly wrap her in his arms as well.

He’s warm and his hold is surprisingly soft and tender, letting her burrow in against him, breathing in his now familiar scent, her eyes closed, her head rest on his chest, his chin on top of her head, holding her in against him.

She’s breathless when she finally lets go and looks up at him, shocked and delighted in equal measure, “I was afraid that I wouldn’t see you again.” She manages to tell him faintly.

He nods, still looking a little dazed and surprised that he’s made it back here himself, “I had those fears myself.” He confesses softly to her, gazing down on her with something close to awe.

Reaching up with a trembling hand, he softly brushes her cheek with the tips of his fingers again, marvelling at her, “You made it back. You made it back safe.”

She nods, finding a soft, shocked smile coming to her lips, “Yeah.” She whispers quietly, “Yeah, I, I made it.” A hoarse laugh bursts from her as she reminds him, “But you...” Staring up at him and looking him up and down, a hand reaching out and running down his arm until she finds his fingers she whispers hopelessly, “I thought, I thought you were dead, Marcus, I thought you were dead, I-“

Laughing a little himself he shakes his head and murmurs shakily, “You didn’t really think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you, Abby?”

Giving him a light, almost affectionate shove she growls forcefully at him, “Don’t you ever do anything like to me again, do you hear me?”

“Yes ma’am.” He replies, with a hint of that cocky sarcasm that used to drive her insane.

Before she can answer him however, the others interrupt, crowding around him and welcoming him back and making noises of general surprise and delight to see him again when they all, like her, assumed the worst and thought that he was dead.

After a few minutes of impulsive hugs and gruff handshakes, she notices how much he’s swaying and how pale he is and shoos the others away so she can march him into her tent, sit him down and start patching him up.

Knowing it could have been worse, much worse, doesn’t stop her hissing and wincing sympathetically as she peels back the sleeves on his shirt and starts tending to his injuries, beginning with the most serious she can find and  then working down. The wound on his arm she suspects came from it being grazed by a bullet is the worst and she decides it requires a few stitches which he looks none too pleased about, particularly when she pulls out a long, curved needle about the size of his pinkie finger. 

“Are you sure it needs that?” He demands, becoming, if possible, a little paler than he had been before produced it.

“Yes.” She growls firmly, “It’s getting stitched up, no arguments.” He huffs and grumbles darkly but doesn’t balk or flinch too much from her as she begins to knit his skin back together, though he pointedly looks away from the wound as she works, gazing firmly into the canvas wall behind him, his fingers tap, tap tapping unhappily against his knee. 

A soft smile touches her lips and she tries to lighten things a little, “You escaped near death and somehow managed to find your way back to us, you can’t get brought down by a couple of stitches.”

“I don’t like needles.” He informs her unnecessarily.

“I’ve noticed.” She smirks lightly, tugging another suture into place and tutting impatiently at the irritable shape of his wound that’s making it harder for her to close. “It’ll be neater than the crooked mess you made of my head wound.” She teases lightly.

“I only put in two stitches.” He tells her indignantly, as though that means he can’t possibly have made a mess of the suturing.

“And yet they were still crooked.” She presses, grinning and tilting her head slightly so she can see what she’s doing as he starts shifting away from her. “Stay still.” She growls irritably at him.

He does as he’s told, still grumbling about her jibe on his sewing abilities, “You’ve had more practice at this than I have.” He reminds her flatly.

“Exactly.” She smiles sweetly, “You have a professional tending to you, stop complaining.” He lapses into silence at that and she puts her last stitch in, admires her handiwork for a moment, then pronounces herself satisfied and bandages it up.

After that, she moves around the rest of him, using the tears in his clothes to point her to similar tears in his skin and cleans out and binds up each of his wounds then produces a bottle of the antibiotics they had managed to get out of the pharmacy with and instructs him on how to take them to stop his wounds getting infected and keep him healthy. 

As she works, she has him tell her what happened and how he managed to escape and get away. He shrugs, as though he’s not quite sure, which she can understand, barely being able to scrape together the details of her own escape, which was significantly less traumatic than his own.

 He reels things off in a flat, dead voice, telling her he injured three, possibly killed two as they were making a break out of the town. The rest he led into the forest and lost them in there, plunging straight into the heart and finding somewhere to hide and wait for them to lose themselves, far from them, he makes a pointed note to tell her. After that, it was just a case of getting his bearings and then finding them again, which was what had taken the most time.

He speaks calmly and flatly, telling the tale with such detachment that she might have thought it had happened to someone else. She knows him better than to press him for any more details of what happened or what he did or what was done to him, knowing that he isn’t ready to talk about that yet, and might never be, but certainly not now when he’s so weak and exhausted and it’s all so fresh.

“Is there anything else?” She asks him sharply when she’s tended to everything that’s visible.

He shifts uncomfortably for a moment then slowly unbuttons his shirt to give her a good look. Cursing him and snapping that he should have showed her this one before she wasted her time with the others, she bends to examine the torn skin, wincing slightly when she realises there’s something stuck in the wound.

“What happened?” She asks, softly probing at it with her fingers and feeling his muscles tense as he winces in pain.

“Some broken glass, from a window smashing, I think.” He tells her, “I think there are some bullet fragments in there as well.”

Huffing at him, she takes up a pair of tweezers an d sets to work, carefully extracting each piece and dropping it into the kidney dish that’s sat beside them, already full of used, bloodied bits of cotton, the ends of his sutures, towels and other debris from her patch up efforts.

Still focusing very firmly and pointedly on his wound and her work, she murmurs quietly, “You’re one of us now, you know that, don’t you?” She glances up at him and catches the surprise glinting in his eyes and so she goes on, her voice low but firm, “You’re family, Marcus.” She breathes quietly, “We look after our own. Whatever, whatever you did before, whatever you’ve done to survive, it doesn’t matter, we look after our own.”

He blinks at her in confusion and she dabs lightly at his wound, cleaning it now that she’s removed all of the glass and bullet fragments that were lodged beneath his skin, “That’s why I didn’t want you to go, to sacrifice yourself for me in that town.” She tells him softly, putting a bandage in place to stop the cut from seeping blood, “That’s why I was upset because...Because I’m not worth saving any more than you are, because we should have found a way out together.”

He seems a little thrown by this announcement and at a loss for something to say to her, so in the end he just, nods slowly and lets a small, lop-sided smile spread across his lips, “So you do care?” He says, his tone light and teasing, trying to make light of her words and of this situation and what he did.

Reaching out, she takes his hand in hers, holding it and looking up at him, staring fixedly until he meets her gaze before she says softly and sincerely, “I told you that I did.” She pauses a moment and gives his hand a soft squeeze, “And I told you never to do this to me again. I want you to promise me that you won’t.”

“Abby-“

“I want you to promise me, Marcus. Promise you won’t risk yourself again, promise that you won’t leave me like that again, _promise me_.”

Hesitating, he looks into her eyes when he nods, “I promise, Abby.” He whispers softly, squeezing her hand back, his tone set and firm, satisfying her.

As she’s finishing and tidying up and he’s buttoning up his shirt again now that she’s finished with him, she turns as she hears him ask softly, “What’s wrong?”

She stares at him, confused, not knowing how he could possibly suspect that she had anything was amiss with her, sure she had wiped away all of the evidence of what had happened to her, leaving nothing to tip him off. The blood has all been washed away, and the thin cut on her throat, once cleaned of blood, is almost impossible to see unless he was already aware of its existence.

“What do you mean?” She asks, looking away at the wrong moment, knowing that he’ll pick up on that and know from it that she’s trying to keep things from him.

“I know something happened.” He says softly, “I know that something isn’t right. I know you, Abby, you’re not yourself.” He says flatly, not leaving her any room to deny it or try and cover things up before he asks starkly, “What happened?”

Intending to deny it, the words already on her lips, airy and light, false but convincing enough to make him drop the subject, she turns back to him again, but when her eyes meet his and she sees the look in them, something in her that has been wavering ever since she got back, ever since she pulled that trigger, breaks, and she finds herself shattering at last, tears whispering down her cheeks.

A moment later, he’s knelt down on the floor beside her, his arms around her once more, holding her to him and trying to calm her as it all comes flooding out of her in one, without any warning and without her permission, she’s telling him everything. Reaching the edge of the town and just wanting to be away, to be safe, not paying proper attention to her surroundings. The man who had grabbed her. The knife at her throat, cutting into her skin, drawing blood. The fear that had welled up inside her. The promise that she had made him and the memory that burned back in that instant, that she had promised him she wouldn’t hesitate. Pulling the trigger. Shooting him. The way the gun had exploded in her hands. Hearing his scream. Feeling his blood soak her hands. Him falling away from her and her running, running as fast as she could, leaving him there on the ground to bleed to death while she fled from what she had done. The guilt that’s been tearing at her ever since.

“I didn’t have a choice.” She gasps to him as his hand softly strokes her hair and tries to calm her down, “I know that I had to.” She breathes hopelessly, “I know that if I hadn’t done it he would have cut my throat, that he would have killed me. I know that, but I, I still, I...If it was right, if it was, if I had to then why, why do I feel so guilty, why does it feel so wrong, why, why, why...”

Trailing away hopelessly, utterly overwhelmed and overcome, she breaks down again, any more thought of coherent words lost in her wracking sobs that shudder through her whole body. He’s patient, and simply holds her against him, murmuring her name and shushing her, trying to calm her down, which takes a long time.

Once he’s managed however, his voice is soft and quiet when he tells her, “What you did was right.” She squeaks in protest at that but he quietens her and goes on, “It was self-defence.” He murmurs, “If that had happened before, before all of this, in the eyes of the law, it was self-defence, there isn’t a jury in the land where you’d be convicted.”

“I don’t care about the _law_ , Marcus.” She chokes out to him, “I shot someone, I took someone else’s life, another human being is dead because of what I did to-“

“No.” He says, his tone suddenly much colder and harsher than it was before, “No. Whatever they were, whatever they might have been once, who we met in that town weren’t human beings any more, Abby. They stopped being that a long time ago.”

He takes a faint, shaky breath and murmurs jaggedly, “There’s so much that you haven’t seen. You have good people around you, good people that you’ve kept safe, that have kept you safe in turn. You don’t know what others are willing to do in the name of survival. They have no laws, no morals. They would have butchered you, and me, and never lost a moment’s sleep or spared us a second thought. And killing is the least of the things that they’ll do.”

Pausing a moment, he swallows hard and goes on, “Some people stopped being people the day those bombs fell. You give some men the taste of blood and that’s all they want to drink, they can never have enough. Nothing means anything to them anymore but survival, keeping themselves alive whatever the cost. They’ll turn on innocent people, they’ll turn on their own. They’ll do whatever it takes. And they’re a lot of things, but they’re not human anymore, that was burned out of them a long time ago.”

Shifting her slightly and pressing her in a little closer he whispers softly, “I know that you feel guilty. I know that it’s hard. I know that you think this will haunt you forever, and maybe it will, maybe you’ll always feel that you have blood on your hands, but you’ll go on, you’ll get through this, you’ll understand. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day you’ll understand what those monsters were capable of, that it came down to him, or you, and that there isn’t anyone on the face of this Earth now, or then, who would have made a different call.”

Shivering slightly he whispers, “When I gave you that gun, I told you not to hesitate. Because I know you. I know what you are, Abby. You’re a good person. In spite of all of this, in spite of what you’ve been through, what you’ve seen, what you’ve lost, you’re still a good person. I knew you would hesitate if someone threatened you, I knew if you did that they would kill you, I couldn’t let that happen.” He says firmly, tightly gripping her shoulder, “I needed you to pull the trigger.” He whispers softly, “I needed you to come back.” 

She nods shakily, and finds herself whispering faintly, “I did.”

He holds her a little tighter and nods, “You had no choice.” He breathes quietly, “You had no choice, Abby, and you’ll get through this.”

“Thank you, Marcus.” She says quietly, then, taking a deep breath, she sits up a little straighter and pushes herself up out of his lap saying firmly, “You should get to bed, get some rest, we’ll be moving on soon.” 

He nods and makes to leave her tent for the privacy of his own, turning at the opening and saying quietly, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Smiling she finds herself nodding as well in return and murmuring quietly, “You too.” 

****


	11. Part 11 - Static

_Part 11 – Static_

The bullet bursts through the air, ripping through the silence with a ferocity that’s mirrored in his eyes with a loud bang and a sharp crack when it makes contact with the bowed tree trunk he’s been using as target practice.

He barely registers the first impact before he’s corrected his aim and pulled the trigger again. And again. And again. And again. Over and over. Different points but without a pause or a breath between them, only stopping when the gun chokes on nothing because it’s empty and done in, a little too much like his owner for him to want to dwell on that. 

When that happens, he ejects the magazine and his hand then slides smoothly down to his hip and grabs another, full clip, jams it into the gun, and on and on it goes, with only a faint beat between the last shot and the next one he fires off, never taking his eyes from his target.

His head pounds. Every time a bullet bursts against the tree trunk, he sees blood spray that isn’t there, he sees flesh rip and skin tear, he hears screams, he sees the twisted expressions of those in agony, those he’s killed, a day ago, a month ago, a hundred years ago, they all flash before him, one after the other, every bullet brings forth another ghost, replaced with yet another the next time he pulls the trigger. At the time, he had thought he would forget them, he had thought that he wouldn’t remember them, he had half hoped, half prayed, that he wouldn’t remember them, that they wouldn’t continue to haunt him. But they had. Each and every one. On and on without respite.

The alternative to reliving his ghosts and the deafening sound of their screams punctuated by the rhythmic bang and crack, bang and crack, bang and crack, of the gun spitting bullets into the wood opposite him however is silence. Silence that deafens. Silence that consumes. Silence that suffocates. If there’s anything he can’t stand any more, it’s silence. Because inevitably his head chooses to fill that silence with things he never wants to think about again. It fills it with past wrongs, with past regrets, with past failings, with a past that he’s desperate to move on from, desperate to forget but that he never can. 

He hadn’t had a choice. He hadn’t taken any pleasure in any of the things that he’d done. He hadn’t enjoyed them. He hadn’t _wanted_ to do any of them, he had been forced to. That doesn’t make any difference in the eyes of his twisted conscience and his bleeding soul that’s ripped and torn and gushing sins by now. A few more shouldn’t make any matter, but it does. He feels them as keenly as he did the first.

Closing his eyes, he rolls his shoulders and swaps the clip out again as it empties. This has been going on for hours by now. Several of the boxes of ammo he’d picked up from the supply run into town with Abby had been stuffed full of blanks, useless for trying to stop anything that’s coming for him and his, but good enough for this, for blindly firing away his pain.

One good thing to be said for the apocalypse he supposes, is that it doesn’t easily foster addicts. It’s hard to drown his demons in alcohol when they never come across any, and when they do it tends to be saved up for medical purposes. The same with pills. There are so few vices left to them anymore that this is all he has. His gun and his guilt, hand in hand, striving to keep him awake.

Yet again, he’s found that he can’t sleep. And yet again he’s found that he has little to no wish to. His ghosts will visit him there as well, only there he can’t close his eyes and put another bullet in them, reinforce that choice and make them leave him in peace until they swing back round again. In his dreams, in his nightmares, he can only ever beg them to leave, and they never do. Tormenting him is all they have left to them, so that’s all they do.

Sleep hadn’t come easily to him even before the world went to Hell and he’d spent months running alone, looking over his shoulder, waking up every half an hour at the slightest sound or whisper of breeze on the back of his neck. More than once that had been the only thing that had kept him alive. But that didn’t stop him hating it. He had always hated it. But he had had more ways of keeping it at bay and bringing it on back then. He would read. He would walk. He would drive. And when he was done, sleep would usually consent to take him for a few hours at least and let him rest. Now though, those luxuries are in short supply, and so is any respite from this world found in dreams.

Every time he closes his eyes he sees that damned town, he sees the people who cornered them, the people who would have killed Abby, the people who hunted him down like an animal with every intention of killing him as well. He sees them dead. He says them bullet riddled and bleeding. He sees them gone where they can’t hurt him, or Abby, or anyone else he’s come to care about ever again. But it doesn’t bring him any peace. In fact it only brings him turmoil. Their deaths haunt him. Necessary. Justified. Forced on him. They haunt him.

But he had pulled the trigger then and he would pull the trigger again. It’s no longer simply his life at stake anymore. He has other people to consider, people that he’s come to care about. Sometimes he wonders if he wouldn’t have been better off alone, if he should never have tried to join this little group, if he should never have let himself care about people again. But he knows that’s no good either. He needs these people, as much as they’ve come to need him. Going on for solely himself, with only himself as the justification and motivation for all of his sins, all of the things he’s done to survive, he’s now done for them too, that balances the scales somewhat, it helps, a little, a little...

Pausing a fraction longer than he usually would have in loading a clip, hearing movement behind him, he turns to find Abby quietly watches him from a few feet back, her eyes guarded and darks, her arms folded protectively across her chest.

Taking a few steps towards her, he asks, suddenly concerned, “Is everything alright?”

She moves in a little closer herself, nodding steadily, “Fine.” She murmurs distractedly, “Everything’s fine. I just wondered where you-“ She breaks off, flushing a little and letting her eyes drop away from his as she speaks. “It doesn’t matter.” She says abruptly, turning on her heel and making to leave him, “Everything’s fine.” She repeats again as she begins to walk away.

Taking another step forwards, suddenly struck again by one of the many thoughts that had hit him last night, lying staring up first at the canvas of his tent, then the inky, star spattered sky, one of the better ideas that had come to him, he catches her wrist lightly between his fingers, without any real pressure or force in the contact, just enough to let her register his presence and stop and turn to him if she wants when he says, “Abby, wait.”

Doing as he wants, she turns and blinks at him slowly, “What is it?”

Releasing her, he straightens and holds out the hand gun to her, “I think you should learn how to use one of these.” He tells her seriously, “I mean really use one. How to aim, to reload a clip, to clean it, proper shooting technique.”

This had come to him as his mind had wandered back to dwell on what had happened in the little town whose name he couldn’t remember anymore. They had been forced to split up, and apart from a small pistol that she had about thirty seconds of experience and instruction on, he had left her completely defenceless to make her way back to camp. She had, by some miracle, but if he hadn’t given her that gun, if she had slipped and forgotten how to use it in the heat of the moment, if she had refused to take it, she wouldn’t still be here and that thought frightened him more than he could say.

Understanding her, and understanding the way she thought and worked after all this time spent travelling with her, he understands why she might not be the world’s biggest fan of guns. But in the times that they were living, with the people and the things that they were seeing every day and having to deal with every day, she needed to do this, she needed to learn, she needed to start carrying, she needed to be able to protect herself if they were attacked or if they were separated. It wasn’t enough for her to have the small blade at her hip, that he knew she would use more when she was being a doctor than a survivor.

The world was evolving, becoming grimmer and darker and harsher and if she wanted to survive, she had to adapt to those changes. And he wanted her to survive, he _needed_ her to survive, so one way or the other, he had to get her to agree to this.

Something seems to tighten in her face and she makes no move to touch the weapon in his hands, “I don’t-“ She begins, seemingly transfixed by the small metal object balanced innocently in his palm, still held out to her, “I don’t know, Marcus.” She says slowly, clearly hesitant and reluctant to take him up on his offer, “I don’t ever, I don’t want to do _that_ again.”She says, still looking at the gun and not at him, referring, as they both know, the to the incident in the town in which she had, at the very least, severely wounded someone else, which he knows, for all his attempts at reassurance and comfort, still plays on her mind.

“I know.” He says softly, then, instead of trying to argue the same arguments he’d been using on her again, he changes tact a little and reminds her that, “But people aren’t the only threats that we have to face anymore. A well-placed bullet will take out a Synth as easily as it will a person. If we’re attacked by a large group, we need everyone to know what they’re doing, and to be carrying and ready, and if you get separated again.” He breaks off, his blood chilling in his veins as his impulsive spiel throws up another memory, “That day in the forest,” He reminds her softly, “If I hadn’t come back to find you, if I hadn’t been lucky enough to stumble across you at the right time, you wouldn’t be here, Abby. You need to learn to protect yourself. You need to learn how to use one of these.” He says, trying to offer her the gun again.

She still looks unbearably wary and though she raises her hand a little, it trembles and she never extends it enough to come close to lifting the weapon from his hands, “I’m worried about you, Abby.” He breathes softly, wondering if a more emotional argument will sway her where cold logic has failed, “I just want you to be safe, to be able to look after yourself and fight back if you need to. You might not, you probably won’t, I hope you don’t, but if you _do,_ I don’t want you to be in a position when you feel helpless and in peril okay?”

That seems to move her at last as nothing else had, and at last, she nods slowly, “Okay.” She murmurs softly, agreeing more for him and to put him at ease than for herself and he protection he suspects, before she, reluctantly still, he can tell, reaches out and hesitantly takes the gun on his palm in her hand and holds it loosely at her side, looking as though she’d rather be holding a venomous snake than this. 

Moving forwards cautiously, he raises her hand, drawing her gaze to him for a moment before she focuses on the weapon on her hand instead as he begins to carefully shape and place her fingers around it, showing her the correct way to grip and hold it. He then shows her where the safety is on this model and how to switch it on and off, then slides her index finger up to the trigger. 

Stepping in behind her, he releases her and tells her to aim for the tree opposite them, the way he had been doing when she had come upon them. Taking a deep breath, she raises the gun a little and pauses to let him correct her. He makes a few minor adjustments then nods for her to pull the trigger. She does and the unexpected kickback pushes her body back against his and forces him to gently cushion the impact and settle her on her feet again.

Glancing up, he realises she’s hit the trunk almost dead centre, something that she seems to be a little bemused by as well, and, emboldened by this early success, she takes another shot which hits its mark only a few inches to the left of the first. The third only clips the edge of the trunk but still isn’t a complete miss.

“You’re a natural.” He murmurs softly to her as she lowers the gun after the third shot, his breath stirring her hair and making her shiver a little.

Twisting a little, but trying not to move too much out of the stance he’d put her in, she looks back up at him and raises her eyebrows, “There’s no need to sound so surprised.” She says, with a touch of light indignation in his tone. 

Letting a soft smile touch his lips, he crosses his arms over his chest and reminds her evenly, “You were a doctor, a trauma surgeon. I would have expected you to be better at saving lives than taking them, and cleaning up this sort of mess rather than making it.”

Shrugging, she answers back, “I guess I’m just full of surprises...”She pauses a moment before she adds, almost teasingly, “Besides, surgeons need good hand-eye co-ordination, it isn’t that unlikely.” Her voice shakes a little when, after a long beat she goes on to say softly, “It seems I’m more made for this world than you thought...”

Something in her tone catching his attention and making him glance down at her and catch the look in her eye, dark and hollow, hiding from him and he remembers her initial reservations about his suggestion of teaching her how to properly use the guns, and her reasons why, and wonders if she’s less okay about all of this than she had tried to insist to him.

He knows that she still feels guilty about what happened, that it still gnaws away at her, even though she’s put a brave face on for the group, trying to insist that everything’s fine, playing down what’s happened, what she went through, to spare her friends, and try and insist to herself that she’ll be alright as well.

For a moment he starts to wonder if this was a bad idea, if it’s too much too soon and has triggered something in her that would have been better left alone and if he’s brought everything all crashing back down into her at once.

“Are you alright?” He asks her quietly, leaning down and forcing her to meet his eyes to judge her reaction, “If this is too soon, if you’re not ready, if you don’t want to do this, I understand, Abby, it’s okay, we can leave it for another time or-“

“No.” She interrupts him flatly, shaking her head, meeting his eyes when she says firmly, “No, you were right Marcus. I’ve been shying away from this since things started, I thought...I don’t know what I thought, but I need to be able to protect myself and help to protect our group, if we’re attacked, I don’t want to be defenceless, and I don’t want to leave them exposed because I’m still clinging onto a past we can never have back.” Nodding firmly she says, “I have to do this, I need you to teach me.”

Watching her, the stubborn defiance in her eyes nearly, but not quite masking everything else, he takes a step forwards and very gently eases the pistol from her fingers, finding that they relinquish it to him without protest, her eyes never leaving his as she does so.

Setting it aside, he reaches out and, rather clumsily, places a soft hand on the top of her arm and gives it a faint squeeze, “It’s okay, Abby.” He murmurs softly.

“What?” She asks, blinking up at him, looking a little lost.

“If you’re not okay.” He tells her quietly, seeing the faint flicker in her eyes that tells him he’s right and she’s not at all alright, “You went through a lot, you were forced to do things that you thought you would never be able to do, that you should never have had to do. And if you feel like you don’t know who you are or what you stand for anymore-“

“I know who I am.” She says softly, “I know what a stand for.”

Nodding, he says, more softly still, “That doesn’t mean that everything’s fine, though.”

Hesitation chews at the start of her answer and seems to make it stick in her throat for a long moment before she finally manages to say, so faintly that if they weren’t standing alone in such silence, he’d have missed it completely, “No. It doesn’t.”

Moving in a little closer, his hand automatically brushing against the small of her back, and pressing in harder and more confidently when she makes no move to pull away from his comforting touch and he finds his hand gently rubbing up and down as he murmurs to her, “That’s alright.” He feels her shiver a little beneath his hand, “If you want to talk about it-“ He begins cautiously, but that she does pull away from, sharply.

Shaking her head vigorously she drops his gaze for the first time, “No.” She says, a little too harshly, “Thank you.” She adds, her tone softening somewhat, her gaze reconnecting with his once more, “But no.” Taking a deep, shaky breath, she seems to feel compelled to try and give him some sort of reason for this and explains hesitantly, “It’s done. No amount of talking will change what he did to me, or what I did to him. It won’t change what happened. It won’t make it go away. And maybe it might make it a little easier to deal with,” She says, her voice becoming a little stronger, seeming to sense what he was about to gently suggest to her, “But I’m not ready to talk about it...I don’t even know if I’m ready to deal with it yet.” She adds with a humourless little smile, choking back whatever emotion is rising up in her chest, “It’s in the past now.” She goes on, steadying again, “It’s over. I don’t want to drag it up and rake over it all again. I’ve done plenty of that myself, I’m done dwelling on it.” Giving herself a shake, she defiantly meets his eyes and announces flatly, “I want to shoot things.”

Smiling and forcing a soft laugh at that, he nods, being able to understand and empathise with this if nothing else, and he appreciates her honesty, and respects her boundaries. If she’s not ready to talk and open up, he won’t force her. Though he does say softly, “If you ever do want to talk, if, _when_ you’re ready-“

“I know.” She says, with a quiet, sincere smile, “I know where to find you.”

Nodding, he says no more on the subject, letting it drop the way she wants it to and, returning the handgun to the little pile he’s brought with him, he picks up a larger rifle and brings that to her instead, making her raise an eyebrow at him as she catches sight of it.

“Aren’t we jumping a head a bit with that?” She asks him cautiously, regarding him warily.

Smiling gently, he shakes his head and says, “You have good aim, and good control. And this is only your first lesson-“

“You assume there will be more?” She asks, arching an eyebrow, a faint smile quirking her lips.

“I _know_ there will be more.” He corrects smoothly, carrying on without missing a beat, as though there had been no interruption, “I want you to get a feel for this. It’s better for range, distance shots, very powerful, very accurate, pick off a group of enemies before they’re upon us.” Pausing a moment, he adds with rawer honesty, “And it’s good fun to shoot.”

She seems to appreciate that sentiment and she rewards his efforts with a faint laugh and acquiescence to this idea. Handing her the gun, he gives her a few verbal directions to give her the right idea than puts his arms carefully around her, altogether aware of how close she is, and of the heat that’s radiating from her body, not to mention the little patches of green and gold he’s starting to become aware of from the sun filtering through the trees above them.

Jolting himself firmly back to the present, he concentrates on the task at hand, he begins making small adjustments to her grip, bracing the gun a little more securely against her shoulder, raising her elbow, sliding her hands into a better position.

Carefully, he shows her how to load it, inserts a cartridge and then puts his arms around her again, his larger, more confident hands covering hers, his finger curling around hers on the trigger. “Ready?” He breathes softly in her ear, knowing that the recoil from this shot will be a shock to the system and not wanting to have her go into it completely unprepared.

A taut, sure nod is his only answer to that but it’s enough. Contracting his finger, he shows her how to gently squeeze the trigger to have the gun behave the way he wants. As predicted, the kickback from the shot  sends her back into him, nearly causing her to lose her feet, but he had prepared for that and was already half way to catching her and setting her carefully back onto her feet before she ever really needed him to.

“Thanks.” She gasps, a little breathless, a small smile curving her lips, seemingly in spite of herself. “You’re right,” She tells him, letting herself glance briefly back at him, “It is good fun to shoot.”

Raising it and bracing it against her shoulder once more, the way he had taught her, she loads and sets up another shot. One hand resting on her arm is enough to make her pause and wait for further adjustment and instruction, but her grip is good, all he does this time is gently place his hands on her hips, squaring her up a little and making her stance a little better, something that sets them both to trembling as he feels faint shivers tingle along his spine at the intimate contact and the way her body immediately and instinctively responds to his touch and his guidance.

Swallowing, he remembers what he’s trying to achieve and leans in to carefully adjust the scope and show her how and the best way to use it to help her aim. Again, she lightly squeezes the trigger, and again, the recoil presses her back flat against him, and this time she glances back at him.

“Good.” He nods, trying to keep himself present , “That was good.” 

Taking a deep breath, he takes an abrupt step back from her, realising that he’s close enough to feel her breathing and realising that heat is rising up into his cheeks, causing him to turn away from her, fumbling for something to say, anything, to distract them from this moment that’s building up between them.

Fortunately, a distraction arrives without requiring him to think of a change of subject when Bellamy interrupts them to tell them that Lincoln has food ready for everyone. He gives them an odd glance, peering from one to the other of them, before he turns and leaves.

Letting his gaze connect with Abby’s once more before they head back to camp, he relieves her off the rifle and says hastily, “No, you go on, I’ll catch up.” She nods, leaving him to pack up and settle himself out, the last static of the charged tension that last little moment had inspired between them still crackling faintly through his veins, making him wonder. 

****


	12. Part 12 Scorched Souls

 

_Part – 12 – Scorched Souls_

Hands shaking worse than they were before, so badly that she can hardly look, and between that and her right hand constantly straying to her bare left wrist, running her fingers over it as though to be sure, to be completely sure that it really is gone. And even after she’s sure, her fingers still wander over to the bare patch of skin, like a tongue that’s drawn to a missing tooth, she can’t stop reminding herself of the gaping hole where she once had Jake’s watch.

The others are getting restless as she tears her tent apart for the fourth or fifth town, upending her covers, unpacking and repacking her bag over and over again, picking through what few possessions she has, feeling into every corner and every crevice where the tent itself might be hiding it. All that’s earned her so far are several scrapes on her furious, heedless hands and tears of frustration stinging in her eyes, not to mention an increasingly scattered and raw around the edges, knowing that everyone else was ready to move on hours ago, but she can’t go, she won’t go, not without that watch.

Apart from the wedding ring on her finger, which is hers, that watch is all she has left of him, all she’s managed to hold on to through all of this. It’s a part of him, a part of her life before, it’s something that comforts her sometimes at night, still, even all these months later, when he’s been gone for so long. She needs it, she has to find it, she can’t just leave it behind and let it go, anymore than she can Jake.

Tearing through her bed for what feels like the hundredth time, knowing that it’s hopeless, knowing that she won’t find it, knowing that it won’t miraculously appear between the sheets this time. But she has to keep trying, she has to do _something_ , she has to find it, she has to, she has to, she _has_ to.

Dragging her fingers through her hair and forcing herself to bite her lip instead of screaming in her fury and frustration, so many memories she didn’t think she still had being churned up again in her mind like sand in a storm, too hard to grasp or control and utterly overwhelming.

The tent flap behind her is twitched gently aside to admit someone from outside, no doubt coming in to chase her on, to tell her that it’s a shame, and they’re sorry, but they need to move on now, not understanding, never understanding why this is so important to her, why she needs this so much, why she’s falling apart so much at the thought of having lost a watch. Because it’s not just a watch, it’s Jake, it’s their relationship, their _life_ together, she can’t just walk away from that, she won’t, whatever they say to her and whatever the threat, she’s not leaving this camp until she has it back in her hands again.

“Abby-“

“I know.” She snarls, a little hysterically, turning wildly on them, “I know we have to move on. I know it’s getting late. I know we were supposed to leave hours ago. I know we have to leave. But I’m not, I’m not going without this so just save your breath-“

She breaks off when she realises that it’s Marcus crouching down quietly opposite her, raising his hands slightly against the furious tirade she’s just spat out at him. He doesn’t say anything, but somehow he doesn’t have to and she just finds herself taking several slow, deep breaths to calm herself down before she says, almost calmly, “You should take them on if they’re getting restless. I’ll catch up when I’ve...When I’ve finished tidying up here.”

Shaking his head slowly, he answers gently, “They’ve gone, I’ve just sent them on.” She opens her mouth, eyes wide, pushing herself to her feet, suddenly furious with him as well as herself but he makes a placating motion with his hands and says evenly, “They’re not going far. They’ve all got guns. They’re all strong, and smart, and sensible. They can look after themselves, they’ll be fine.” 

Nodding slowly, she finds the wisdom in that and lets it lie without further question or complaint. Then she finds herself squinting up at him in surprise, “What about you?” She asks, confused, “Why haven’t you gone with them?”

“I can, if you’d rather do this yourself.” He replies quickly, making it clear he doesn’t want to intrude if this is something she has to do on her own, in itself more insightful than anything else anyone has offered her that morning, “But I thought you might find it a little sooner if you let someone help? So I stayed to help. If you want it.”

If anyone else had asked she would have turned them down, made an excuse, tell them to go, set up at the new camp site they’ve chosen, she would have insisted on being alone. She almost tells him the same thing, to go, leave her, she can do this herself, waste her own time, risk her own life on this, he doesn’t have to, but something in his eyes makes her stop, the words catching in her throat. Empathy, she finds empathy in his dark eyes, and understanding and instead of telling him to go, she finds herself nodding and reaching out to him, her fingers scrabbling for a moment before they close around his and she says, a little hoarsely, “Thank you, Marcus.”

Letting himself smile slightly for a moment, he gently squeezes her hand back then lets her go, his tone much more businesslike as he asks for details about the watch they’re looking for. 

She gives him as good a description as she can but then murmurs, “But I’ve torn the camp apart twice and I’ve been over every inch of this damn tent a hundred times over and I still can’t find it, I...” She trails off hopelessly, massaging her temples, trying desperately to think.

“And those are the only places you’ve been today?” He checks with her, peering half-heartedly under a few of the clothes scattered around him that had been collateral damage as she had burned through the tent like a hurricane in her desperation, without any real hope of finding what he’s looking for, “Just your tent and the camp? Nowhere else?”

It hits her in that moment, his words suddenly clearing the haze that had somehow kept her from remembering and she grips his arm as she shakes her head and says, “No, I, the lake, I went to the lake this morning to wash up.”

Smiling, he pushes himself up and offers her a hand to help her scramble to her feet as well and she’s barely steady on them before she’s ducking out of her tent and striding off with Marcus having to lengthen his strides to the point that he’s almost running to keep up with her as she hurries off, heedless. 

“Abby-“ He says at last, catching up with her and grabbing her arm and stopping her, making her turn back furiously towards him, “Slow down.” He says firmly, his hand still tightly holding her by the wrist, “We don’t know if anyone or anything else will have come to that lake by now.”

“I don’t care.” She snaps restlessly at him, “I’m getting that watch back. Whatever’s waiting there better stay out of my way if they know what’s good for them.”

“Does that include me?” He enquires mildly.

Opening her mouth, she finds a faint, hopeless laugh coming out at the expression on his face instead of words, harsh or otherwise and she finds herself slowing to a somewhat more manageable pace, falling into step beside him and acquiescing a little, seeing his point at the end of the day, “Okay.” She shrugs quietly, “Maybe you have a point. A couple more minutes won’t kill me.”

“Exactly.” He says, striding off again with her at his side, “And this way you get to enjoy even more of my company, all to yourself.”

Shaking her head and ducking it a little to hide her smile, she shoves him playfully, making him stagger a little and chuckle lightly at her.

 Settling out again, his tone becomes a little more serious as he says quietly, “This is important to you, isn’t it?”

Nodding, her throat tightens, suddenly painful, but she manages to nod and choke out, “Yeah. It belonged, it...Well, let’s just say it’s a part of the past that I’m not ready to let go of just yet.”

He nods wordlessly, seemingly struggling with himself, and she catches that same look in his eyes, the one that makes her sure that he knows what she’s going through ,that he understands her and why this is so important, and the reason that he wasn’t hassling her back at camp to start moving on with the rest of them, for which she’s still grateful to him.

“You understand.” She murmurs quietly, glancing up at him. Her words were more a statement than a question, she knows that he does, but he still inclines his head quietly to let her know that she’s right, opening up a little, even if he refuses to speak and his eyes have gone hard and steely in response to all of this.

Her mind seems to wander, of its own accord, back to that first night he had spent in camp, when neither of them could sleep and she had stumbled upon him sitting by the fire when she ducked out of her tent for a breath of air. He had been there too, sitting silent as a spectre, staring wordlessly into the flickering, dancing fire in front of him.

That had been the first time she had felt anything around him. His fingers had brushed against her wrist, against her bare skin, and for the first time in months, since Jake’s death, she had seen the dull orange flare of the flames and the bright gold sparks that they spat up to be swallowed by the darkness.

Before that though, she had questioned him, still suspicious of him, trusting him about as far as she could throw him, even though he had saved Raven and brought her back to them. She had pushed him and pressed him and he had infuriated her, turning back every one of her questions and making it about her instead.

But she had managed to get a few answers and explanations out of him, one being that he had come through this whole thing alone, he had never had a group, had never had people around him, he had always been by himself. 

She had never really wondered at that. After coming to know him in the weeks and months afterwards, she had come to realise that he was solitary by nature and for every evening he spent by the fire talking and laughing with the others, there were three more that he spent sheltering alone in his tent or striding off into the woods to run and shoot and do whatever else he needed to in the comfort of his own company and none other. Now she begins to wonder if there’s more to his loneliness and his circumstances than she had first thought.

The lake appears before them, by turns a black mass, but the light shimmering off of it turns gold and deep blue whenever he draws too close to her, something that she’s gotten used to by now, but at the same time isn’t sure if she’ll ever completely get used to. As it appears though, she returns her thoughts to the task at hand and she and Marcus split up to divide and conquer the area.

They’ve only been looking for ten or fifteen minutes at the most when she hears his shout from the opposite bank and sees him hold something up that glints in the light and makes her heart jolt. Pushing herself to her feet again, she hurries round to meet him as he offers her the watch she had taken off that morning to bathe and had forgotten to pick up again, flustered and running late for breaking camp.

Gently taking it from him, she immediately restores it to its rightful place on her wrist and immediately relief surges through her like a dam bursting free of its tense restraints and flooding back into the bed that contains it, calm and complete again and she feels herself settle out once more, feeling suddenly as though all the problems in the world that seemed to have reared up and submerged her have gone and that she can breathe again.

Flushing a little bit, she becomes suddenly aware that the action of slipping the watch back on her arm doesn’t quite do justice to the grandness of her panicked search for it all morning, like a tornado tearing up a town to find a needle in a haystack when it was relatively simple to find once she got to the right place she just hadn’t been able to consider this morning in her frantic desperation to just have it back.

Suddenly remembering that she’s not alone here, she glances up and smiles almost shyly at him, “Thank you, Marcus.”

He blinks, a little surprised at the sincerity in her tone, “It really wasn’t that difficult to spot, Abby, it was just sitting there.”

“I know.” She says, feeling more heat rushing up into her cheeks, “But thank you for helping me look and, and for understanding that it was important to me.”

“Anyone with two eyes knew that it was important to you.” He answers softly, watching her carefully, something strange stirring in the depths of his eyes, sadness and grief she thinks, but she’s not sure.

Nodding, she lets her fingers trail lightly over the face again, watching the second hand’s slow, steady progress around the edge, transfixed for a moment before she looks up at him again and repeats her words, “Thank you.”

This time, he simply accepts her gratitude with a small smile and a nod, “You’re welcome.”

Suddenly very aware that she’s been standing in the same spot simply staring into his eyes for the last few minutes, she gives herself a little shake and makes herself blink and break eye contact with him, turning and staring around them instead.

Imitating her, he scans the landscape around them and comments quietly, “It’s beautiful here.”

Nodding, she softly agrees with him. This little area drew her to it as soon as she stumbled across it, she hadn’t wanted to leave it. It almost seems to have been protected from the devastation that’s consumed and destroyed most of the landscapes, burning away trees and plants and destroying any wildlife they once held.

For whatever reason, this place has been sheltered from it. The water of the lake is a deep, rich, velvety blue whenever Marcus gets close enough for her to see it. The sunlight shimmers and dances off of it in a way that makes it appear as though someone has casually thrown a handful of diamonds across its surface. The trees are thick, dense and luscious and make a sprawling leafy canopy around them, hiding them away from the awful world beyond and again making her reluctant to leave. 

As though he’s read her mind or just sensed her reluctance to move on somehow, he gestures her towards a cluster of flat rocks grouped on the bank of the lake not far away and she falls into step with him, taking the hint and following him over towards them, taking his hand and letting him help her up onto them before wandering to the edge and perching in such a way that, when she strips off her socks and shoes, she can dip her feet in the cool water, tracing soft patterns on the surface with her toes.

After a moment’s hesitation that he takes to consider, he eventually folds himself down and settles beside her, wincing a little and immediately drawing a critical look from her. “Is that wound still bothering you?” She asks him severely, nodding towards his chest and daring him to deny it.

“A little.” He agrees gruffly, looking too wary of saying ‘no’ altogether.

Sighing, she tells him flatly, “I told you to _rest._ ”

“I did!” He protests indignantly. “For a while.” He amends somewhat at her glower of disbelief and disapproval.

Shaking her head, she gestures him a little closer and says, “Just, make sure you do tomorrow. If this new camp is what you claim you’ll just be able to spend the day recovering. The last thing we want is you getting an infection...Or tearing those stitches, which would mean I had to put them in again.” That gets through to him judging by the grimace and he mumbles a faint, grumpy promise to do as he’s told and spend the next day recuperating properly.

Once he’s sure that she’s finished reprimanding him, he settles himself down on the rocks beside her, dipping his feet in the water as well but jerking them out almost at once yelping in surprise and dismay. Jumping, startled, she stares up at him for some sort of explanation and he just mumbles sheepishly, “It’s cold.”

Giggling at that she shakes her head, continuing to drag her toes through the water, watching the ripples that spread out from the places that she touches and demands, “What did you expect? An artificially heated Jacuzzi? In the middle of the forest?”

“I didn’t expect it to feel like an ice bath.” He grumbles sourly, looking a little abashed by his outburst and dips his toes back in again, much more gingerly than before. She responds by swiping her foot to the left and causing a little wave to lap up, soaking his foot and ankle making him start and glower reproachfully at her, jostling her lightly with his shoulder and making her laugh lightly again.

“Stop being pathetic.” She chides him, “It’s only a little bit of cold water, it won’t kill you.” He darkly mutters something that contains the word ‘hypothermia’ and she finds herself both shaking her head and chuckling at him.

They sit side by side for a while, just sitting and taking some time to breathe and enjoy that feeling again for the first time in so long. After a little while, he turns to her, hesitantly, and cautiously gestures towards the watch on her wrist, “Who gave it to you?”

 _Here, hang on to that for me._ His words to her, that morning, the moment that she knew that this wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought, that it wasn’t as simple as he’d claimed, that everything was going to change for her. If she had known the extent of that, if she had known just why he was asking her to hold on to it, known that he would never have come back to get it from her, she would never have let him leave. But if she’d done that, she, and almost everyone else she has left would be dead.

It takes her a long time to find an answer for him, “My husband, Jake.” She finally manages to answer, staring pointedly at her hands, or out at the water, anywhere but at him, “He, he gave it to me the day the bombs fell.”

 Pausing a beat, trying to control herself, realising how long it’s been since she spoke about Jake, and that she’s never spoken to anyone about this at all, but somehow she is now, words pouring from her like blood from an open wound without stopping, “He was an engineer at the Hub. He knew something was going on. He, he thought that he could stop it.”

 Closing her eyes she feels herself tremble, but he doesn’t interrupt her or ask questions and she finds it easier to keep speaking into the silence, glad for his patience, “One morning he, he gave me his watch and he told me to hang on to it for him. I should have known then but I didn’t.”

His easy lies about it setting off alarms and triggering this protocol or that when he went to try and stop it had been easier to understand and swallow than the truth. She had actually believed that he could fix things, that everything would be okay. She had been younger then, without the weight of the world on her shoulders or the souls of a hundred ghosts haunting the hollow spaces in her eyes.

“He never came home.” She finds herself whispering, swallowing hard, shaking her head and adding, “After that day, no-one did. No-one had a home to go back to.” 

“He died in the blasts?” Marcus asks her gently when she lulls into a transfixed silence.

Nodding, she tugs idly at a loose thread on her sleeve and murmurs dully, “He called me. He told me that something was wrong. He told me to go, take some friends, warn as many people as I could and get out. He told me that he’d meet me just outside of town, to wait for him there but...”

“What happened?” He prompts her quietly, after giving enough time to compose herself.

“When I was a kid, my mother told me that one day I would meet someone, someone special. She told me that that person would change everything, the way that I saw things, the way that the world was .She told me that one day I would wake up and I would see things that I had never been able to see before. I shouldn’t be afraid when that happened I should be happy. Because it would mean that I was in love and I had found the person that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with.”

Letting herself smile, just a little, at the memory, she tells him quietly, “Jake was the first person that I fell in love with...I had been with other people but no-one like him. The first time he kissed me I knew. The way the world just suddenly lit up.”

She smiles faintly at the memory, being able to see that moment more clearly than she can see anything else, finding that everything else has faded but not that, never that.

“Everything felt so much fuller and richer and _better._ ”She remembers faintly, “It was the first time that I had seen so much and felt so much...And I suddenly understood everything that my mother had told me, about everything, everything changing and being better and really being able to feel like you were alive for the first time.”Closing her eyes, feeling tears cling stubbornly to her lashes, refusing to let her blink them away, “Too bad she never told me...That when that person died...When they died you...”

Breaking off, overcome, she closes her eyes and lets him draw his own conclusions from that, sure that he can read between her words and find the implication that she still can’t bring herself to say out loud.

“It’s never the same again, is it?” He breaks in softly and she glances up at him, eyes damp and streaming, blurring him but not so much that she can’t make out the grief reflected in his eyes, “Before, when you’re a kid you don’t know any better.” He murmurs faintly, sounding almost as though he’s speaking more to himself than to her as he muses, “That black and white and grey, that’s all you’ve seen, all you’ve understood since the moment you were born. And even those little flickers and tastes in between...They’re nothing like the real thing. And once you lose that. The moment that it all goes back to the way it was it...That’s it, there’s nothing that can bring that back, there’s nothing that can help, there’s nothing you can give you hope when you’ve had that and lost it.”

Something in her makes her reach out to him then and quietly slip her hand in to his, her eyes never leaving his as she nods slowly, squeezing gently and feeling him respond. And for a moment, the world floods with everything that they’d lost, so bright and vibrant and overwhelming that she releases him in surprise, as though the contact had sent static shocking through her skin.

Breathing a little hard, her eyes still caught on his, she manages to look away as her vision returns to its uniform black and white and she remembers what they had been talking about before. Shaking her head she finds herself saying, “That was the worst part. It, it wasn’t just knowing that he had died, that he was gone. That was bad enough but it was...The _finality_ of it.”

Taking a deep breath, she irritably rubs at her eyes before she goes on, “We saw the first bombs go off in the distance, in the place where he’d told me to wait for him. We watched them go off, we saw what they did, what they destroyed.”

Shaking a little now and feeling him shift in a little closer to her, trying to comfort her, but still keeping quiet, letting her talk, gasping and halting between almost every word now, struggling to get them out but determined to go on, to say it, suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to share it with him, “The light was so bright that I, I closed my eyes...When I, when I opened them again.” She closes them now, giving her head a little shake, feeling tears sting at her again, trying to stop herself from letting them fall, at least until she’s done, “He was gone.” She chokes out, “He was gone and I knew it. Every fibre of my being knew it. The second that his heart stopped, I knew, I _felt_ it, I, I can’t explain it, it just...”

A strange, dead, hollow sort of calm seems to settle over her like a shroud and she finds herself saying, almost steadily, “Nothing could ever have prepared me for that. No-one should ever have to go through that. Seeing that, feeling that, knowing, knowing that’s all they’re going to see again...”

Something snaps inside her, her fingers knotting together, tugging and twisting and pulling and straining, the water her feet are trailing through suddenly seems to freeze and spread through her whole body, sliding through her veins and chilling her to the core.

“He had told me to wait, wait for him up there, where we watched him and millions of other people die. He told me that he would see me again soon.” Trailing off, it takes her a second to find her thread again, “There was no point in waiting there for him. No chance that miracle might have saved him. No thread to cling to that he knew what was coming, he might have been able to get somewhere safe, he might still make it out, he might come and find me again after everything.”

Ducking her head down, she rubs at her eyes again, her breath hitching slightly, “There was no hope left. He was gone. He was dead. He was dead there was nothing I could do. I could rage and scream and cry but I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t save him. All I could do was leave him behind with everyone else that had died there. He was, he was _gone,_ gone, and I was never going to see him again or be with him again or...And that, what hit me then, in the aftermath of all of that was...I just felt, I felt as though, as though-“

Breaking off, unable to go on, overwhelmed, she hears him very faintly finish her sentence for her, saying what she could not, “It felt as though you had died with him?”

Glancing up at him and meeting his eyes again, she nods slowly then says hoarsely, “You lost someone too?” 

She knows that he has. He feels her pain too acutely and understands her feelings far too deeply for it to be another way. But she phrases it as a question to give him the option of not opening up about it if he doesn’t want to or if he’s not ready yet, providing him a way out if he doesn’t want to keep venturing down this path.

But like her, there seems to be something in him that needs to get this out of his system, as though he’s being purged of a deadly poison that’s slowly been eating away at him for all this time that he wants to rid himself of at last.

He nods jerkily, opening then closing his mouth several times in silence, wanting to go on but not sure how.

“When the bombs went off?” She asks him softly, “Or later?” She wonders then which would be worse. Having them taken from him the way Jake was taken from her, suddenly, with no warning, miles and miles away from her, with no chance ever to prepare or say goodbye. Or afterwards, surviving that, coming through a nuclear apocalypse only to perish while trying to survive.

“Before.” He replies flatly, which startles her, since she had never even considered that as a possibility, but the moment it hits her it somehow seems to make sense.

Years on, it still hurts. It still tears at him. It still sends a lance through his heart just to bring her to mind now. Even here with Abby, with someone he’s come to trust and care for and feel as comfortable with as he has anyone, has come to extend himself to more than he has anyone else since her death, it’s still hard, the thoughts and memories still burn, the words still jam in his throat like toothpicks, sharp and stiff and choking.

Haltingly, staring fixedly at a chalky deposit in the rocks beneath them ,he begins to tell her, “We, we worked together, before all this.”

“She was a cop too?” Abby prompts gently, reaching out and moving in a little closer still to him, so that he can feel the warmth coming from her and have her brush against him every now and then.

He inclines his head in agreement, “A little younger than me, a little below me in rank.” He explains quietly, “We were partners.”

The word, and all the implications that it carries still stings at him. They were partners. He was supposed to have her back. He was supposed to be there for her, to catch any dangers she might have missed, as she had done for him. He was supposed to protect her, to keep her safe, to make sure she went home to the people who loved her at the end of the day.

And the intimacy of even their working relationship is all wrapped up in that word as well. He spent almost all of his days, every minute that he had, in her company once they had started living together. All of the time he had was with her and yet somehow it wasn’t enough; could never be enough now. He had woken up to her smile every morning, gone to sleep with it brushing against his lips at night and watched it light up her face whenever they closed a case during the day.

The ache in his chest where once he thinks a heart might have been pangs then and he realises he still misses her, as Abby misses Jake, as they both will do until they die themselves and join them if they can.

He had been lighter then, before her death. He had smiled more often and more easily and it had felt more genuine. The day she had died, he hadn’t been sure he would ever remember how to do that again. Abby had reminded him, in part, she had taught him how to laugh again, and opened him up to things that he hadn’t seen in so long, that he thought he had forgotten, that, when he had seen them those first few times, he had taken for signs that everything that had happened to him had finally driven him to his knees and made something snap in him that couldn’t be fixed.

Giving himself a little shake, he remembers that he’s in the middle of trying to tell her what had happened and, swallowing hard past the growing lump in his throat, he goes on, “It was just, a normal day. We hadn’t even gotten a callout, we were just on a routine patrol. We heard shots fired nearby, called for back-up, went to see what was going on...”

Trailing off, feeling, as he always does whenever he tries to think about this or talk about it, which he barely did at the time and hasn’t done since, as though he’s somehow removed from everything that happened, as though it had happened to someone else without his involvement, as though he hadn’t been there, a distance, a barrier put in place perhaps to shield him from what had happened, he never knows.

His breath catching slightly, he jolts himself out of that and goes on flatly and without warning, “I was there. I was right there with her. Standing right beside the whole time. I never looked away. I never even blinked but...” He shakes his head, his brow creasing in a confused tangle of frustration and bemusement, “I still can’t tell you what happened. I couldn’t tell them afterwards either. They asked, they wanted reports, statements but I...I still don’t know. There was a shout. A shot. One minute she was standing there, saying something, trying to call out to them and then...”

Then swims up in front of his eyes, unbidden, unwanted. Because as much as he can’t remember how it happened, how she was shot, or even who had done it, which he had never known, since they had never found them, he remembers what had happened in vivid, awful detail.

The blood that had run through his fingers as he had panicked and cradled her to him and desperately tried to staunch the wound, had been so warm, the way she had been, and so red, so brightly, vividly scarlet, seared into his memory for years afterwards that when his memory of every other colour had vanished, he could always easily call that blood red to mind. The last memories he had of her, of a world that had once been bright and sweet were stained with red, that he could never wash away or escape from, something that had haunted him for months after, and still returned to trouble him some nights even now.

“And then she was bleeding.” He finds himself saying, barely knowing what he’s saying or who he’s trying to say any of it to anymore, “There was a bullet in her chest and she was bleeding so badly and I, I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know what to do. I called for help but...”He shakes his head, his voice catching as he tries to explain, “They were all too late. The back-up she had radioed, the paramedics that I called, they were all too late. She died right there in my arms and there wasn’t a single thing that I could do about it.”

Her hand softly squeezes the top of his arm but he can’t look at her again, not yet, or he won’t be able to go on, and now that he’s started, he has to finish, “I knew, I knew that she was dying because, because everything started fading around me. I knew the second that she was gone, when there was no hope anymore and she wasn’t coming back to me.” A faint, humourless little smile tugs at his lips when he murmurs, “My world ended a long time before the apocalypse.”

A moment later, he feels her fingers slip softly and hesitantly around his, wanting to comfort him. He lets her, relaxing his hand and allowing her to link her fingers through his, squeezing gently, moving in even closer to him until their bodies are pressed close together, “I’m sorry, Marcus.” She murmurs quietly, her cheeks stained with the evidence of her tears.

“I’m sorry too, Abby.” He tells her sincerely, wrapping an arm around her body, drawing her in a little closer in to his warmth.

“But we’re still here.” She says quietly, raising her head from his shoulder to look into his eyes again, “We’re still fighting. We’re still surviving. Finding new things to fight for, to survive for.”

“New people too.” He says, his eyes flickering down from her eyes to her lips, something clenching and swooping in his stomach at the thought that whispers through his head in that moment, that seems to be echoed in her as she mirrors him.

“There’s still hope for us.” She breathes quietly, leaning in even closer to him, her eyes definitely fixing on her lips and his heart starts hammering.

“Yes.” He breathes as she tilts her head up to him, so close that he can feel her breath hot against his mouth that seems to have suddenly gone very dry. He can count the dried tears on her lashes, can see the want in her shadowed, hungry eyes, can see what she hopes for, what she needs from him, and he longs to give it to her, “There is.”

Her eyes close and her fingers wrap tightly around the front of his jacket, pulling him in closer, so close, so close and then all of a sudden she’s pulling away from him and he’s grabbing for the gun at his hip, water droplets flying everywhere as he pushes himself to his feet, turning and drawing at the same time at the loud crack that had burst through the silence behind them.

Turning, he finds Raven standing flushing and looking embarrassed at what she had almost walked in on, and lowers his gun, sighing, half in irritation and half in relief. “Sorry.” She says, breaking the silence and rubbing the back of her neck, “I just wanted to make sure the two of you hadn’t drowned in that lake.” She informs them by way of explanation, locking eyes with Abby as she grins and says, “Clearly not.” Swivelling around again, she limps back in the direction of camp, calling over her shoulder, “As you were.”

Shaking her head and laughing, as flushed as he is, Abby starts gathering up their things and he mirrors her, both of them pointedly avoiding the other’s eye, not quite sure what just happened between them and where they go now, just knowing that they’ll be together. 

****


	13. Part 13 - The Hornet's Nest

_Part 13 – The Hornet’s Nest_

The rest of the world sleeps when her eyes flutter open again, darkness filling the little cave they had made it to the night before, swallowing them all up and extending to the mouth and the night sky beyond, only discernible from the rough black cave walls because of the smattering of stars that peppers it.

Wriggling out of her bed she dresses quickly and quietly in her corner so as not to wake anyone else then pads to the entrance, picking her way between the others still fast asleep and unaware. Stepping out onto the ledge beyond she closes her eyes and lets the light wind lift her hair and blow lightly over her skin, waking her up properly.

Dawn comes upon her a few moments later and as the sun comes up the others start to rise as well, some easily, some, like Raven, grudgingly, needing Bellamy’s assistance in stealing all of her covers before she’ll consent to rise. 

As they start getting food sorted, Marcus limps to her side and she eyes him looking concerned, leading him a little bit away from the others and opening up a few buttons on his shirt to peer at the bandages around his chest which, despite the fact she had changed them the night before, are already spotted with dark spots that show he’s bled through.

Glowering darkly at him, she sighs, worried and says, “I told you not to do overdo things.”

“I’ve been trying.” He tells her mildly, then reminds her that, “But we climbed halfway up a mountain yesterday.” He says, gesturing around them and at the steep slope beneath them that sinks down to the valley below. 

“Yes. Which was your idea.” She counters, rolling her eyes. “You’re being confined to bed rest all day.” She says, in a tone that warns him not to argue with her. But of course does.

“You’re planning a supply run today-“ He begins, flaring up immediately.

“And I’ll have plenty of hands and eyes around me.” She interrupts sharply, “Everyone’s going- Everyone except you.” She adds pointedly seeing his eyes light up, spotting an apparent loophole which she’d closed as soon as she’d seen that. “I told you, you’re no use to anyone if you make yourself ill, or if you make that worse. I’m going to take a better look at it when we get back.” She informs him, still squinting at it in concern, “It might be infected already.” She grimaces at the thought then says ,”We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Just rest here today, we might get away with it.”

“Yes dear.” He replies innocently making her blink up at him, half in surprise and amusement and half in suspicion that he’s going along with all of this too easily.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and exhales, turning back to rally the rest of her troops who are summoning the two of them for something to eat before they go. Once they’re all fed and watered, she organises them and they head out, leaving Marcus a little sullen and alone in the cave, clearly unhappy about this arrangement, but also obviously becoming concerned enough himself about the wounds that had seemed to minor at the time, that he’s eventually willing to listen to her and stop this before it becomes something much worse. 

He watches them go from the mouth of the cave, nodding to her as she heads out, she nods back, promising him that they won’t be long.

She doesn’t doubt that. They had spotted a small town on the way past and, wary though they were from the last time that had attempted a similar supply run, they had scouted it from a distance and the area around it and kept an eye on it from their vantage point in the hills and had more carefully planned this excursion, choosing to take no chances, even though the area around them seems utterly deserted. Almost too much so, she thinks before shaking her head and telling herself she’s starting to get paranoid on top of everything else.

This town isn’t nearly as far away as the last one was either, if she looks hard, even all the way at the borders of it, she can still just make out the mouth of the cave where Marcus is waiting for them , no doubt anxious and pacing, restless and worried, but she hopes he’ll have the sense to at least try and relax even a little. 

And this time, there’s a gun strapped to her hip. Marcus had made good on his word of keeping up her practice at shooting after the day they’d spent together, he’d insisted on finding some hour of the day to drag her off and give her some more, even insisting she sit at nights, practicing sorting out bullets, matching them with their guns and reloading clips.

She had to admit that it was paying off and she was getting better. How she felt about that was still up in the air. But Marcus’ terms for staying behind and letting them go without him had been that this time, she take a weapon with her, not just relying on one that was pushed on her at the last minute. Given that the last time he had pressed a gun into her hand she had been hard pressed to refuse him this time.

“Promise me.” He had murmured again, without specifying what but she knew. It was the same promise that he had extracted from her before, that’s seared into her memory, and will be forever she has no doubt. The promise that had saved her life and ultimately changed it, pushing her to do something she had never done before, had never even contemplated before. The promise that if her life was ever in danger, if there was a time when she had to use it, that she wouldn’t hesitate, she would do what she had to do; what he needed her to do, she would pull the trigger.

“I promise.” She had told him quietly and sincerely, tucking the gun into her jeans and nodding at him, something that had seemed to put him a little more at ease as they left; though it had been clear that he still wasn’t happy with the arrangement.

Giving herself a little shake, she quickly forces her thoughts away from Marcus Kane and back on the task at hand as they come upon the town a once cheery, now rather battered and worn welcome sign greeting them as they enter, glancing at one another a moment before plunging on in.

Underwhelming is the first word that comes to mind with this place. It’s run down and worn and looked as though it was in definite need of some attention and consideration before the apocalypse claimed whatever residual charm it might have been harbouring. And the less than inviting exterior isn’t the only issue. The first four or five stores they push their way in to past the boarded up windows and doors are empty, having been picked clean before them.

When they finally come upon the largest supermarket in the centre of town, they discover that, even though they still have food stuffs left, they’re all done and old, every one of them out of date, which explains at least why they’ve been left behind.

“Something’s not right here.” Octavia says, brow furrowed, two tins in her hands, staring around her and looking troubled.

“Why? What are you thinking?” Lincoln asks, stopping scanning the few shelves that had once held medicines, most of which seem to be covering the floor at his feet that he steps over to walk closer to her to listen.

“The dates on all of the food in here-“ She begins, squinting down at them.

“Yeah. They’re all useless and done.” Bellamy puts in sourly, tossing aside the fruit bars he had been holding in disgust. 

“Yeah, but they’re not just done,” She goes on, rounding on her brother, still looking troubled, “They’re not just a couple of months out, Bell, they’re _years_ away from being edible. And just one or two, all of them.” She says, which makes the others take a closer look at the things they’re holding, nodding slowly, realising that she’s right, “They were all done long before any of this started and the people left this place. It’s like...It’s like no-one’s lived here in years.”

“Yeah.” Raven murmurs, snatching up some of the pill bottles on the ground at her feet and examining them, “All the drugs too. And some of them last _forever_.”

Before any of them have the chance to think this over any further or start tossing out theories as to why this might be, several things happen at once, utterly distracting all of them. One of the shelves behind Bellamy topples over, making him, and everyone else with him, turn towards the sudden crash, which drastically cuts the time they have to respond when the bullets start flying.

A stun grenade is the first thing that lands in their midst, sending all of them to their knees, gasping and disorientated and she has no time to think or wonder or plan, only to turn, blindly, behind her, where the next attack seems most likely to come from, finding two tall figures, half obscured by the lights popping in front of her eyes ,moving towards them.

She keeps her promise again. Scrabbling for the gun at her hip and hitting the person nearest to her as she does so, to make them aware of the danger that they’re in, she raises, aims as best she can, then pulls the trigger, firing off a shot that catches the figure on the left, making them stumble but not stop.

Knowing she has no time and with her head still spinning and pounding, her vision more of a hindrance than a help, she propels herself forwards, away from them, dragging the person she thinks is Raven with her, struggling desperately to get out of the way, knowing that she makes for an easy target sprawled helplessly on the ground.

Staggering to her feet, she realises that both Octavia and Bellamy are already on their feet, swaying slightly, both still obviously feeling the effects of the grenade, but somehow managing to push through it, guns raised and howling as they fire off more bullets.

She and Raven make their way towards them, pulling weapons of their own and answering, covering one another, constantly shifting and moving, finding new places to crouch and shoot from, trying to find an exit to get out of the limiting shop where it’s altogether too easy to pin them down, trap them and then execute them.

The element of surprise is now lost for their assailants however, and all but wasted, the stun grenade not having incapacitated them as much as it should have and now they’re fighting back, tooth and nail, no holds barred, relentlessly retaliating, just wanting to make it out of, what seems increasingly like a trap, designed to draw them in, lull them into a false sense of security, and then kill them all, alive.

Afterwards, she would swear that the fight was over quickly, that it hadn’t lasted that long, and she can barely thing of enough words to tell anyone what happened. At the time though, it feels like she’s found herself in the middle of a war that point blank refuses to end, dragging on and on and on. Every time she thinks she’s safe, every time she lets herself believe that they might all be gone and starts to motion to the others to head for the door, to get out, to get away, another bullet flies overhead and something explodes behind her and shatters those ideas.

The air hangs heavy with smoke and the reek of gunshot residue consumes every breath she takes, drawing it down deep into her lungs where it burns like a still stirring fire. Adrenaline thunders through her veins, another shot seeming to plunge through her system every time she pulls the trigger on her gun and spits another bullet at shadows that seem as insignificant as the ghosts that whisper in her head at night, and as impossible to free herself from.

All of a sudden, just as she’s fired a new clip into her gun and turned to scan the room to find something else to shoot at, it’s over. But  her body doesn’t seem to realise that it’s over. She’s still too on edge, nerves too frayed, too paranoid. Every breath seems too loud in her ears and it sounds too much like the whisper of a foot across the floor, drawing closer to put a bullet in the back of her head. Every heart beat pounds too loudly in her chest and her first thought upon hearing each one is that another gun has gone off and killed someone that she loves.

When Lincoln puts a gentle hand on her shoulder, she whirls to meet him, gun drawn but he raises his hands and softly tells her that it’s finished, it’s done, they won. Somehow, his quiet, calm words through the chaos of the storm that just blazed around them helps to calm her and, nodding and trusting him, she stows her gun again and glances around her.

Everyone seems a little shell shocked by what just happened to them and though she can see a few cuts and bruises in evidence, they all still seem to be defiantly standing, looking around to assess the others’ conditions shared looks of shaky relief passing around them as they begin to realise that no-one has come out of the skirmish with any permanent damage done. 

Abby is the first to speak, her voice hoarse and a little more tremulous than she would have liked, “Is everyone okay?” She asks, needing to be sure, to hear their voices saying something back to her. A chorus of general agreement follows in response and she feels herself settle out properly. 

Pushing back her hair and cautiously drawing her gun again, she gives instructions for them to perform the rather grisly task of checking to see if anyone else made it out of alive and then deciding what should be done with them.

It quickly becomes apparent though that ‘alive’ was the wrong word to use when, after a few moments of searching, Raven, to everyone’s initial shock and horror, holds up a brutally severed head for their inspection. It takes a few minutes for Abby to realise that what she had initially taken to be viscera is actually wires.

“They were all Synths?” Bellamy asks her, his voice palpably strained, glancing around at the others as he speaks to see how they’re taking this revelation.

Raven nods significantly, her gaze jumping from one to the other of them, the head still clutched dispassionately in her hand.

“We should go.” Lincoln says quietly, breaking the tense silence at last, “They’ll have sent out a distress signal, that went on too long for them not to. There will be more of them here. Soon.”

Raven nods, but makes no move to leave, or to release her prize, “Okay, I get that. But...”

“You want to take a look inside?” Bellamy checks with her, turning to look at her. 

She nods again, “They’ll be able to tell us something, where they came from, how many they are, if there are any other nasty surprises in the area.”

Considering quickly, Abby offers a sharp nod, “Do it.” She says, “But do it quickly.” She sends Octavia and Lincoln outside to keep watch for more of them, or any other people, who can be almost as dangerous if they’re the wrong ones, and warn them of anyone or anything approaching them while Raven works.

Bellamy remains inside with her and they both move to Raven’s side, after double checking that the rest of the androids they took out are definitely destroyed and beyond repair or causing further damage, and the pair of them watch as she starts picking it apart with something close to glee.

Octavia and Lincoln duck back inside to report that they can’t see anything close, but there’s a large group, of people or Synths, they can’t tell from the distance, moving towards them, and they need to wrap this up, just as Raven tosses down her screwdriver, looking distinctly grim and paler than before.

“What?” Abby demands, a little more sharply than she had intended because of the worry that flashes through her from reading the look on Raven’s face.

Instead of looking to her, she turns to Octavia and says quietly, “You said it looked like no-one had lived here for years?” Octavia nods in agreement and Raven groans heavily and takes a deep breath before she reports, “That’s because I don’t think anyone _has_ lived here in years.”

A faint shiver runs through Abby at that point and a faint swoop of dread clenches her stomach, like a frozen hand contracting around it, chilling her to the bone at the unreadable implication that hangs in the air like a foul perfume at those words.

“You’re not making any sense, Raven.” Bellamy says, crossing his arms across his chest and studying her with a definite frown, “There’s a whole town around us-“

“There’s not.” She argues, shaking her head, beginning to speak a little faster as she urgently tries to get her point across to them, “This place is just a shell of a town, an imitation, but it’s not real. It’s run down, not looked after-“

“The world ended Raven, no-one’s had much time for gardening since.” Bellamy points out flatly, a sceptical eyebrow raised. 

Glaring at him, she ploughs on stubbornly, “Everywhere is boarded up. All the shops, all the houses. With the world ending, people fleeing their homes who don’t have time for gardening don’t have time to waste for that either.” Pausing to snatch a quick breath and glance around at them all, she plunges on, “All the stores we checked were completely empty. Not just cleaned out, there was never anything in them to clean out. And this one, the only place that we found anything at all, everything went of date years ago.” Waiting a beat that even Bellamy doesn’t fill with more protests she finishes softly, “I think the people that were here, if they were ever here at all, were made to leave a long time before the world ended.”

“What are you saying here, Ray?” Bellamy asks her softly, his eyes guarded, suddenly looking as worried as she is.

“I’m saying that...The Synths that stumbled across us here...I don’t think they just happened to come upon us. I think it was the other way around.” She pauses a moment to let them digest this, “I think that they were already here.”

“They were waiting for us?” Lincoln asks sharply, taking a step towards her.

“Not exactly...” She says, clearly struggling to figure out how to explain all of this.

“Where is all of this coming from, Raven?” Abby asks quietly, trying to follow her logic and her thought process, which usually becomes pretty clear once she slows down enough to explain for everyone else who isn’t working quite as quickly as she is.

“At the end of the day, even though they look like us and act like us, to the point that they can fool us into thinking that they _are_ us, the Synths are robots, computers on two legs.”

“So?” Octavia prompts.

“So, computers have brains, of a sort, and memories. And if you can get to them quickly enough and they’re not totally fried, there’s a lot of data that you can get out of them, who they’ve come into contact with, the numbers of the patrol that they belong to, the place they came from, right back to the person who made their hardware and their software, it’s all in there somewhere if you know how to get to it.” Breathing deeply, and looking around them all, becoming visibly paler with almost every word she speaks now, she goes on, “And as well as all of that, they’re all fitted with trackers, especially these older models. There are records of everywhere that they’ve been, every mile that they’ve travelled since someone stuck a battery in them and woke them up.” She says, laying everything out as slowly and deliberately as she possibly can, to make sure that none of them misunderstands what she’s saying.

“They haven’t left this town in _weeks_ , months for some of them.” She says, her voice trembling as she says it, “They’re based here.” She says emphatically, staring around here, “They were made here. This whole place is just, somewhere that they can hide in plain sight, underground, probably.”

Horror flickers into every eye, twists every mouth, sends shivers down every spine as comprehension dawns on them all and they realise, one by one, like a set of dominoes collapsing in on one another, exactly what they’ve walked into the middle of.

“That means...” Octavia says, staring around from Lincoln to Bellamy to Abby and then down to Raven who looks as pale and grim as she did when she started this, only now that cold dread is reflected back at her on every face.

“It means that we just kicked the hornet’s nest.” Abby breathes softly, trying to sound a lot calmer than she feels, not wanting anyone to panic, knowing that if she does the others will follow suit and that will undoubtedly get all of them killed.

“Yeah.” Bellamy adds, in a similar tone of forced composure that he definitely doesn’t feel, “And these hornets have a mean sting.” He reaches down and wraps his hand around Raven’s arm, pulling her to her feet, “We have to get out of here. Now. There are going to be hundreds of them on us any minute, we can’t stay here.”

Lincoln nods in agreement, snatching up the few things they’d dropped, “Bellamy’s right. We have to go now, fall back to camp, get Kane, find somewhere else a long way from here.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as that.” Raven interrupts flatly, looking like she hates to be the bearer of further bad news but feels compelled to let them all know.

“Why not?” Octavia asks, glancing up at her brother, a look passing between them before she goes on, “We’re a small group, none of them made it out of this. if we leave now, quickly, and we make sure we don’t leave any sort of trail, we can slip away without them noticing.”

Raven shakes her head, looking stricken and faintly sick. “What?” Bellamy prompts her, not unkindly, staring down at her, feeling her shaking in his grip even as Abby can see it. 

“They have drones in the air.” She says hoarsely, “That one was communicating with them. They’re looking for heat signatures, heart beats, anything that will tell them there are living people out there. They know we’re here. They know where we’ll go if we leave.”

“We’ve handled drones before.” Bellamy points out flatly, “Getting out of this place is our first priority.”

“But we can’t go back to camp.” Abby whispers softly, meeting Raven’s eyes and realising her fears, “If they know we’re then they know where we came from, they know where they cave is.”

_They know where Marcus is. And that’s the first place they’ll go to get revenge for their fallen soldiers, the ones they killed today. Blood for blood._

Terror fills her at the thought, at the implication, at what it means for them, at what it might cost them, at what it might cost her. The bright, terrible lights that flared in front of her eyes, blinding her, the day the bombs went off, the day she lost Jake,  burn in front of her eyes again. The punch to the gut, the way the realisation had torn at her heart and stripped the soul from her very bones when she had opened her eyes and understood what she was seeing, what she was experiencing, what it all meant.

The thought of going through that again. Of losing the hope she had of having that again, of having it snatched away from her and she know she has to do something this time, she has to stop it, she has to get to him, she has to save him. She won’t let that happen again. She won’t let them take anyone else from her. She’s going to find him. She’s going to get him back. She’s not going to let anything happen to him. Not again. _Not again._

****


	14. Part 14 - Ash and Blood

_Part -14 –Ash and Blood_

In fairness to him, he had tried to do what she’d fiercely and stoutly instructed him to do before she had left with the others to head into the nearby town they’d scouted to see what other supplies they could rustle up. At least, that was the excuse she had given him, but sometimes he thought she just liked to be _doing_ things, she needed some sort of task or purpose to keep her busy.

This should have meant that she was far more sympathetic to his cause than she had been; but the doctor in her had clearly triumphed over the restless soul that dwelled within her bones and so he had been confined to bed rest and recovery for the day.

In fairness to her in turn however, he had to admit that she had a point. The wound that he had taken escaping from the town and the ambush that he and Abby had found themselves caught in, two flies in a black widow’s web, though it had seemed small to begin with, only a few fragments in his chest that she had plucked out and bandaged up, had worsened over the last few days. It was in an awkward place, and whatever he did and however careful he was, he always seemed to be stretching it and pulling it and it had gotten to the point where some of the cuts, already widened and aggravated by their hike up this hill to the safety of this cave he had spent a few fond weeks in some time ago, had opened up and begun to bleed and ache again.

He understood her desire to keep him here and have him rest up, and he understood it as well, little though he had liked it. And he had made a serious attempt at doing so, having a little more to eat to keep his strength up then returning to bed to try and get some more sleep, thinking that would be best, hoping that by the time he woke again they would all be back.

It hadn’t been that simple though, things were rarely that simple anymore, and in hindsight he should have known better. He had stubbornly remained wrapped up in his blankets on the cold stone floor for almost half an hour, tossing and turning, forcing himself into one position after another, trying to find something that worked, before he had finally been forced to give it up and had risen again, trying to find some other light task to hold his attention until they got back.

He had cleaned up the things they had eaten for breakfast, made up all of the beds, packed each in neat little bundles that would be easy to put away when they left this place and had repacked his own bag, which was all he had with him, twice to try and keep himself occupied. All in, this had only killed about another half an hour, forty minutes if he was lucky.

Nothing he did could stop him worrying about them and berating himself, insisting that injuries be damned, he should have sucked it up and gone with them to protect them all, to protect her. Whatever he does to try and occupy himself, and however much he insists he’s being stupid and paranoid, he can’t shake the instinct that’s still twisting in his gut that’s telling him they’re in danger, that something is wrong, that something is going to go wrong.

After all his years as a cop, he’s come to trusts those instincts and it feels wrong to sit here ignoring it and trying to convince himself of any other position to make himself feel better. A part of him wants to go after them to check on them, but he knows that’s madness.

Dragging his hands through his hair and taking several deep breaths, he pushes himself up and walks to the mouth of the cave, thinking vaguely that perhaps some fresh air will help clear his head and make him feel a little better. The back spaces he had been huddled in, while dark and relatively cool, were beginning to feel oppressive and suffocating and some clear air will hopefully do him good.

Moving forwards he steps out into the faint light of the morning, scanning the landscape in front of him. Instinctively, uncontrollably, his eyes are drawn to the little town that they headed out to this morning, like the eyes are drawn to a rough, raw scar in otherwise perfectly smooth, unblemished skin, caught immediately by imperfections and things that seem out of place and feel wrong.

And this feels wrong. All of it. He wonders if they made it in unscathed. He wonders if it’s a trap. If it’s not what it seems. He wonders if any of them will come back to him. He wonders if she’ll come back. Or if he’ll be alone again. The way he was before he found them. A shudder ripples through him. That’s not something he ever cares to go back to, whatever happens, he won’t, he can’t.

He should have stopped them. He should have gone with them. He shouldn’t be sitting here playing house, he should be with them, watching their backs, keeping them safe, helping them if it comes to a fire fight, which something in them keeps whispering again and again that it will, that it has. And he wasn’t with them. If they’re dead then he let them die, when he could have saved them, when he _should_ have saved them. He should-

All thoughts are forced violently from his head, leaving nothing but base instinct to make him function when a flicker of sudden, blinding movement right in front of him suddenly catches his attention but leaves him no chance to wonder at its source or its cause before a deafening explosion bursts above him, ripping through the tender pace and quiet of the afternoon, echoing around the cave until he’s sure his ears are bleeding from the sound.

His first thought, wild, indistinct and hopeless, is that the world is ending all over again. That someone has flicked a switch and instead of launching a few bombs, it pitches everything into a cataclysm that it will never, _can_ never come back from, that nothing will survive, man, machine or dust, all of it will be gone when he opens his eyes again.

It doesn’t.

And he manages to snatch a breath and sit up, shaking and panting, staring around him in wild desperation, trying to understand what the Hell is happening to him. Just as he thinks that it’s over, that he’ll have a chance to investigate and understand, that no longer seems to matter to him because a moment later, a second, louder blast, tears through him and sends him to his knees, instinctively covering his ears as he retreats back into what feels like the relative safety of the cave behind him, some sort of shelter or protection.

His heart pounds in his chest, thundering defiant to whatever is going on that he’s alive, that he’s here, that he’s still going. Adrenaline seems to have displaced all of the blood in his veins judging by how fast his heart is racing and how hard it feels to breathe through the shock and the animal terror that has flared up inside him, causing every muscle in his body to shake violently and uncontrollably.

Silence dares to return for a moment. Dust falls in light, lazy spirals from the ceiling for a moment. For a moment he breathes, for a moment he lives, for a moment he hopes. Then another far off bang rips through him, seeming to shock straight through to his heart, freezing it in his chest. 

The walls tremble around him. Then they begin to crumble and collapse around him, burying him and making him yell in fear and shock, scrambling back until he hits solid stone and realises that he’s run out of space, that there’s nowhere left to go.

A chunk of falling debris strikes him hard in the temple and he slumps to one side, slipping into darkness as the mountain creates his tomb around him.

****

They made it out of the town without being molested any further, and see no signs that the cave has been touched either. They run. They run desperately through the woods heading towards something that Marcus had mentioned to her in passing when they had been talking the other day, walking through the area when she had happened to ask him about the land they’re walking, what it holds, what might be useful to them, what might only be interesting to know about it. And now a passing comment might save all of their lives.

Urging them on and on, being driven half by the memory of Marcus’ voice and words and half by her own panicked, terrified instinct, she runs, looking over her shoulder with every other step, expecting the trees in front of her to start splintering and splitting, rent apart by flying bullets that were meant for their heads and hearts. They don’t come. But they’re coming. They are, she knows it, she can feel it. She has to find this, she has to get them there or they’re all dead, all of them.

Her heart leaps in her chest and she finds another burst of strength and speed that she never knew she had left and sprints the last hundred yards towards the small opening in the ground, leading the others towards, and then in to it.

Down and down they scramble, slipping and stumbling on the loose earth, going deeper and deeper under the ground, following Abby, trusting her blindly, trusting that she’s kept them alive so far and that that’s what she means to do now.

Finally, they come on a large cavern under the Earth, an entrance with a steel door waiting opposite them. Crossing to it, she wrenches it open, choking a little on the dust that the action throws up into her lungs, then steps back to reveal a large concrete bunker, hidden and built to withstand nuclear blasts, which it has done admirably, and hopefully anything else this world can still throw at it.

Ushering them insight she finds lights which make it seem a little more accommodating and appealing, and she settles them in to it, looking around them and explaining hurriedly, “You’re deep underground now that the drones won’t be able to find you. Heat, sonar, nothing will work, this bunker was designed to be invincible and invisible. It’ll keep you safe.” As she speaks, she wrenches open her back, sifting through it, sorting out essential medical equipment, which she keeps, from things that she won’t need, glancing up again as she shrugs it onto her back once more she says, “Stay here a little while, make yourselves comfortable, give things a chance to settle out. Then go back up there, draw out the drones, take them out, the way that we’ve done before.” She says, trusting that they can do that, itching to be away, “Keep other safe.” She tells them, offering them one last sweeping glance before she turns and makes to clamber out into the tunnels again.

“Wait.” Raven, who’s closest to her, exclaims, reaching out and catching her wrist, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to find him.” She breathes faintly but fiercely, “And bring him back.”

“Abby you can’t.” Raven tells her, refusing to let go of her, her grip tightening around her wrist as she shakes her head and the others make similar noises of distress and disapproval at this plan.

“Watch me.” She snarls, wrenching her arm free. “He came back for me. He’s saved my life twice already in all of this mess. I owe him.” She tells them, while thinking to herself that she can’t, _won’t_ leave him, won’t lose him, _can’t_ lose him.

“Abby this is insane.” Octavia protests, shaking her head and staring at her, “You can’t do this. If you have to after him wait a couple of hours, wait until we’ve taken out the drones, until we’re safer, it’s too dangerous just now it’s-“ But Lincoln stops her, catching her arm and slowly shaking his head at her.

Looking up at Abby he inclines his head, “Go.” He says quietly, his eyes seeming to understand her, “Go. We’ll stay here .We’ll be fine. We’ll wait for you.” 

Mouthing a soft ‘thank you’ at him, gratitude welling up inside her, she glances around the room again before she promises quickly, “I’ll be back soon.”

Leaving the ‘or not at all’ unspoken, she turns, ignoring the feeble protests that some of the others still try to throw at her, feeling claustrophobic down here in this damn place already, yet another reason to get out, yet another force driving her to the surface again, driving her towards him.

She bursts out onto the surface, sucking down deep lungfuls of air and takes a second to breathe deeply and try and get her bearings and her breath back before she heads off. Scanning the hills that cradle the little valley they’re in in their arms she tries to locate their cave, and a point to aim for.

Only a few seconds of searching have passed before something makes that awfully and abundantly clear to her. A loud explosion rents the air even here and in the distance, she sees a bright ball of flame consume the mountainside and her heart lurches and contracts and seems to forget how to beat even as she forgets how to breathe and finds herself choking on her fear and her pain, utterly transfixed by the sight in front of her, unable to look away, unable to move, unable to do anything but feel.

Before now, she hadn’t really noticed that, even without Marcus right beside her, the world had taken on a faint tint. Still resolutely black and white, but less so, hints of what once was, of what could be again have been flickering in front of her, a fleeting, fragile hope for her to feel truly alive again after all this time.

Only now it’s fading. And now that it’s fading it becomes so obvious, so definite, that she can’t believe she had barely noticed it before. And she finds herself clawing desperately at it with everything that she has left, every fibre of her wanting it, wanting it back, wanting more of it, not wanting to let it go, not again.

But as with Jake, it’s slipping away from her again, slipping through her outstretched, clutching fingers like water, like smoke, like the dreams she once held on to at the start that have all been shattered one by one, left to rot and rest with those she had loved and lost before all of this, with no more place in this new world than she does.

She’s losing him. She’s losing him like she’s lost everything else. Not so soon after getting him back after the town, after being so sure that he was gone, that she would never see him again, that’s cruel and she won’t let it happen.

She can’t. She can’t go through all of that again. She knows she can’t. Not again. She’s been strong. She’s been so strong, and so brave and so defiant through all of this. She’s survived when she wasn’t supposed to. She’s grieved though she’s never had time or a chance, or even a grave to visit and lay flowers at. She’s run with no strength left in her muscles, with her bones feeling like they’ve crumbled away to ash they way her home and her life had done. She’s dreamed and lived and prayed and hoped and kept the people that she loved alive.

And for what? For nothing if it all gets stripped away from her again. She needs to have something to fight for. She needs to have some sort of light at the end of all of this. She needs something to pull her through this. She needs something to make it all worth it. She doesn’t need a reason, or an explanation, or some sort of justification for any of it. She just needs something to fight for, something to live for. She needs something at the other end. She needs to think that somehow, somewhere, there can still be some sort of life for them all out there, that they can find it still, that they can have it still.

She needs hope. She needs him.

Whatever this is, whatever this could be, with him, whatever she feels for him, and she isn’t even sure what that is, she just knows that it’s there, she just knows that there’s something in her that’s drawn to him, that’s connected to him, that wants him, that doesn’t want to ignore this and pretend that it’s not happening anymore.

Everything she is is drawn to him. Everything she has she would give to him, give up for him, just to get him out of this. Everything she could be is balanced on a knife’s edge right now, dependent on whether she can find him, whether she can help him, whether she can bring him back to her or not.

He has to be alright. He has to. And if he’s not, she can save him. She can find him. She can. She will. Because she has to. Because not being able to isn’t an option. And so she’ll do it. Because she doesn’t fail, she never has, she’s never liked the taste, she’s never learned to stomach it. Too stubborn for her own damn good, was always what she was told, never knew when to quit, never knew when to back down. And she’s damn well not going to start now.

Somehow, her thoughts and her fear and her adrenaline has driven her to the foot of the mountains and without pausing to think, she starts scrambling up them as fast as she can, cutting and grazing her hands more than once when she misses her footing or a loose rock gives out from under her. What had taken most of the evening before to achieve seems to blur by her in only a few minutes.

Then it’s a desperate case of darting from cave to cave, calling his name, searching for him, praying for him, feeling her chest become tighter and tighter with every empty one that she pushes in to, her heart sticking in her throat, blind panic beginning to creep into her, threatening to overcome her and ruin her.

Her voice is raw and cracked and hoarse and feels as though it’s been dragged over sandpaper, burning every time she tries to breathe. Urgent, frantic, terrified tears sting at her eyes and she wipes them furiously away as they threaten to blur her vision as she stumbles on and on and on, becoming more and more and more worked every time she fails to find any sight of him.

Hysteria seizes her for a mad moment and she starts to wonder if maybe she’s in the wrong place, if maybe they were never here, if she’s never going to find him because he isn’t here and she’s in the wrong place, led there by the explosion that did an excellent job of luring her away from the safety of her people. Then she gives herself a little shake and insists that no, no she recognises this place, she’s seen it recently, he’s here, somewhere, he’s here, she knows it, she can feel it.

That feeling, more than anything else, solidifies in her, it becomes certainty, and it calms her as nothing else could have. She’s learned to trust her instincts, and she trusts this one, backing slowly out of the small cave she had darted into and nearly broken down in, forcing herself to keep her wits about her, to keep it together until she finds him, until she knows one way or the other for sure.

The third of fourth cave she checks after that makes her heart surge painfully in her chest and her breath to freeze solid in her lungs as she finally, _finally_ finds him, slumped just a few feet away from her but blocked off, surrounded by thick rocks and rubble, lying prone and unmoving in front of her.

“Marcus.” She says, pressing herself in as close as she can get to him. Her only response is silence.

“Marcus.” She calls, a little more loudly this time, fear beginning to flutter inside her chest, a dying bird trapped within a cage.

 “Marcus. Marcus, wake up.” She shouts this time, desperation etched in every agonized syllable, panic starting to overwhelm her, “Marcus you have to wake up, Marcus!”

Nothing. Still nothing.

_No. No, no, no, no, no._

Desperation overwhelms her and she starts to fight her way towards him, urgently shifting aside rocks and rubble to reach him. She’s come too far, she’s come too far to lose him now when he’s right there in front of her, she can see him, can almost touch him, he has to be alive, he has to be ,he can’t have left her, he can’t, she would have known.

Finally reaching him, she crouches down beside him, her hands shaking uncontrollably as she reaches out to him. Up close she can see more injuries that she couldn’t from the cave entrance. A thin ribbon of blood trails from a wound at his temple and she finds others peppering his body, blood soaked through his clothes in several places that she knows she’ll have to examine in a moment.

For now though, she just wants him awake, she just wants to see him open his eyes again and hear him whisper her name. That’s all, that’s all she wants.

When she touches him, he’s cold. A thrill of fear burns through her like a knife plunged into her back, right between her ribs, biting down deep until it hits her heart and sends a stab of pain lancing through it.

Forgetting herself for a moment, her fingers slide to his neck, probing around for a few moments before she finally manages to find a pulse, weak and thread but definitely there, confirming that he’s still alive, still here with her, not lost to her just yet, and not at all if she has anything to say about it, which she means to. At this proximity, she can see him breathing as well, shallow and weak, but definitely breathing, she’s not too late.

“That’s good.” She whispers softly to herself, nodding and looking him up and down again, feeling a calm settle over her as she starts to think like a doctor, “That’s good, okay.”

He’s still cold though, so cold, and that worries her more than anything. Without really pausing to think about it, instinct drives her and she presses in as close to him as she can, folding her body around his as best she can in the cramped, uncomfortable conditions, warming him the only way she can think of.

Settling down, she rests her head on his chest, listening to the faint throb of his heartbeat and the rough sound of his shallow, scratchy breathing as breath rattles around in his chest. Closing her eyes, she nestles in against him, rubbing her hands up and down his arms a few times, the friction generating further heat. Then she cuddles in against him, burying her face in his chest, inhaling his scent and finding a strange comfort in its familiarity, which makes her hold onto him a little more tightly, determined not to lose him.

She lies with him for a while, she’s never sure how long, listening to tiny rocks shaken loose of the cave walls rattling and pattering down before she feels him begin to stir faintly against her, which makes her sit up sharply. Shaking him gently and quietly murmuring his name, after a few more minutes, she manages to coax him fully back to consciousness and a soft smile spreads across her lips at the sight of him blinking blearily up at her, staring around him, struggling to rise until she puts a gentle but firm hand on his shoulder and pushes him back down again, stopping him.

“Abby.” He whispers faintly, one hand reaching up, the tips of his fingers lightly brushing her cheek as though he can’t believe that she’s here, as though he thinks that she’s not real and needs to reassure himself that she is.

Nodding and smiling shakily, she takes his hand in hers, twining their fingers together and gently squeezing, trying to settle him and relax him a little as she peers down into his eyes, so glad to see them, to see him again.

“It’s okay.” She murmurs emphatically to him, squeezing his hand again and trying to instil a little bit of calm into him, “It’s okay.” She repeats tenderly, “I’m here, I’m going to get you out of here, everything’s going to be alright, I promise, I promise.”

He nods and feebly tries to squeeze her hand back to reassure her in time. Closing his eyes he shifts slightly, taking several deep breaths before he lets them flutter open again, looking a little clearer this time as he stares around them, trying to assess his situation and remember what had happened to land him in it. 

“Are you hurt?” She asks him, refocusing him on her after a moment, dimly aware that his hand is still clutched in hers.

Considering that question for a moment he finally nods slowly and says, “I think so...At least...I don’t think anything is seriously wrong.” He pauses a moment then nods, more certainly, “Nothing’s broken, I don’t think.”

“You can move your toes? Your fingers?” She clarifies with him and when he nods she lets herself smile a little, hoping that he’s right because it will make everything here a lot easier, “Good.” She says encouragingly, “Good, that’s good. You’re lucky.”

He nods and offers her a weak little smile at that, “For being caught in an explosion and half buried in a cave at the end of the world I’d say I’m doing great.”

Glowering at his sarcasm she shifts her position slightly, letting go of his hand to allow her to probe at some of the injuries she had spotted earlier. While some of them would, in other circumstances, be considered serious, she knows after applying a few quick pressure bandages to some of them, that the most important thing now, and what needs to be her priority, is getting him out of here. 

“You’re definitely trapped?” She asks him, glancing around on the side of him that’s furthest away from her and seems to be pinning him in place. He nods hopelessly, struggling and straining for a moment to emphasise this before she lays a hand on his shoulder and stops him, not wanting to aggravate any of his injuries, or the already precarious situation.

Her first few attempts to free him make it clear that, while, with the right leverage, she might be able to shift the rocks around them, it’s going to have to be done with a surgical level of delicacy to stop the whole thing collapsing in on them and burying them here for the rest of time, which isn’t a prospect she finds in the least bit tempting.

The whole thing proves to be nothing but an endless frustration. She can’t do anything for fear of making it worse, but doing nothing isn’t an option either. She’s pointedly aware that the longer she leaves him like this, the more his condition will deteriorate and while it’s far from critical at the moment, she knows it won’t take much to tip him over the edge and push him into that. 

But everything she shifts and at some point every breath she takes even, seems to cause something else to go wrong. The walls around them, already severely cracked and fissured, tremble and groan and send little sprinklings of dust and rubble raining down on them from above and around them, making it sound as though small creatures are scurrying across all of the surfaces. It’s obviously unsafe, and she knows that if she moves the wrong piece or is a little too rough at the wrong time, that it could be catastrophic. But she has to find a way to get out of here, to get them _both_ out of here.

By the time she’s sweating and dragging her fingers through her in frustration and slight worry, not failing to note through all of this how ragged Marcus’ breathing has become as she’s worked, almost fruitlessly for all that she’s achieved, which they both know is very little, while alarmingly larger rocks have continued to crumble down about them, his eyes have become a little glassy and far away again and she’s starting to feel traces of panic creep in again.

With surprising strength given his condition, he catches her wrist as she reaches across him to try and shift something else aside to give her access with the thick metal beam she’s managed to find to leverage the debris he’s trapped under and free him.

Staring down at him, wondering if he’s in pain or if something’s wrong, she stops what she’s doing, turning her attention back to him, “What?” She asks quietly as he closes his eyes a moment, as though trying to brace himself for what’s coming next, “What’s the matter?”

His eyes flutter open and find hers in the darkness, his hand sliding slowly up from her wrist to the top of her arm, squeezing tightly and trying to urge her away from him as he says hoarsely through several shallow breaths, “You should go, Abby.”

“Soon.” She promises him firmly, starting to draw away and set to work again, promising, “As soon as you’ll get you out of here we can go.”

Trying to move away, she finds that he won’t let go of her and he looks up at her as he tells her, as steadily as he can, “That’s not what I meant.” That makes her stop and glance down at him ,meeting his steely gaze as he says quietly, “You should go yourself, now. Leave me here and get out before all of this comes down on top of you.”

“No.” She snarls fiercely at him, furious that that’s even a thought that’s entered his head.

“Abby-“ He begins, in a tone of forced reason that riles her up even more.

“No, Marcus I am not leaving you down here to die alone in the cold and the dark while I save myself, don’t even think about it.” She snaps at him, wrenching angrily away from him, not even stopping to consider what he’d said for a second, going back to work even as the walls around them start to shudder and groan alarmingly, as though trying to help him make his point to her.

“There’s no point in us both dying-“ He begins fairly, wincing as he tries to push himself up to keep looking at her, as though she’ll somehow be moved by the look in his eyes or the expression on his face and be persuaded to abandon him to save herself, if she’d been inclined to do that at any point at all she wouldn’t have come here to find him in the first place.

“Don’t.” She growls, flaring up at him at once, her temper rearing up in her like an angry viper, “Don’t give me that bullshit again.” She hisses, eyes flashing, “We’re not going to die here.” She tells him, cutting across him, refusing to let him interrupt and try and sway her, catching him opening his mouth again to try, “And if we do then we’re going to die together.” She informs him bluntly, “We either both get of this or we both die trying, there’s no other way that this ends.”

“Abby, Abby, no, listen to me.” He growls, grabbing at her wrist again and pulling her back round, clearly furious at how helpless his situation makes him, unable to protect her or force her to do what he’s asking her to, the way he had in the town, running off on his own and leaving her no choice but to go through with his plan, “Listen to me,” he breathes again, “You have to go, it’s too dangerous here, this cave is going to collapse before you ever manage to get me out, you have to go, staying here is suicide.”

“Then it’s suicide.” She murmurs quietly, “But it’s my choice to make. And I’ve made it, so stop trying to change my mind, it’s not going to work.” Grabbing up the pole she had managed to stumble across she wedges it in between the blocks pinning him to the cave floor.

“Please, Abby, just-“ He starts, staring imploringly up at her.

“I’m not leaving you here.” She growls furiously at him, whirling on him, eyes blazing.

“I’m asking you to.” He snaps at her, “It’s not worth this, _I’m_ not worth this.”

That catches her off guard and she freezes a moment, staring at him in shock, both of them breathing a little harder than before, and where she was struggling to avoid his eyes before, now she’s struggling to find them again as he pointedly looks anywhere but at her.

Shaking her head, she crouches down beside him, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder, “Why is it okay for you to sacrifice yourself to save me but it’s not alright for me to do the same for you?” She asks him quietly, refusing to look away from him, despite his clear discomfort with the question. 

“I don’t want to get you killed with me. Don’t make me watch you die, Abby, please.” He whispers faintly, his hand reaching out and catching hers, squeezing and trying to urge her to go again.

“I won’t.” She promises simply.

“Abby.” He says, his eyes closing, exhausted and frustrated all at once, “Please-“

“No.” She interrupts flatly.

“Just _go_.” He growls furiously at her.

“ _No_.” She repeats, more firmly this time.

“Abby-“

“I can’t.” She erupts this time, staring down at him and shaking her head, “I can’t.” She repeats again, her voice a faint whisper this time that finally makes him stop and pay attention to her, “I can’t leave you. I can’t lose you, I can’t, I need you.” The words come tumbling out of her without her permission but she says them again, more softly and calmly so that he knows they’re true, so that there’s no doubt at all that she means them, “I need you, Marcus.”

That silences him as nothing else had and, feeling a faint flush creeping into her cheeks, she pushes herself up and braces herself against the pole, glancing down at him, “Ready?” She checks with him and at last, all she gets is a curt nod as he braces himself. Forcing all of her weight downwards, she finally manages to free him, slipping and stumbling slightly as the rubble trapping him finally gives way.

A moment later, she reaches down and grabs for his hand, pulling him roughly to her feet as an ominous, deep rooted crack snaps and echoes around them, making her hastily drag him to his feet and after her as she turns and hurries outside, both of them more tumbling than running down the steep, rocky slope in their haste to get away from the cave as it begins collapsing behind them.

Staggering to her feet, still clinging on to his hand, she turns to him, breathless and a little bruised. He’s pale and clearly shaken, bloody and exhausted, but he’s alive, and he’s standing, swaying slightly on the spot, but still on his feet for all that.

Smiling faintly, she manages to ask hoarsely, “Are you okay?”

Nodding and looking a little dazed he peers down at her, “You?” He pants breathlessly.

“Yeah.” She breathe, taking several deep breaths and clutching at a stitch in her side, “Yeah I’m good.” Glancing out around them, she realises that the sun has gone down completely leaving them with only stars and a pale sliver of moonlight to guide them. “It’s too dark to go trekking through the forest in this.” She says, waving a vague hand around her at their surroundings, grimacing at her as she speaks, “The others are too far away, it’s too dangerous to try and get to them. And I don’t feel much like trying to camp in any of those caves again.”

A wry smile twists his lips as he says quietly, “It’s okay, I have an idea of where we can go.”

Blinking up at him in pleasant surprise she inclines her head in agreement at whatever proposal this might turn out to be, “Lead on.” She tells him, motioning him on ahead of her.

****


	15. Part 15 - Hope

_Part – 15 – Hope_

They only have to walk for half an hour or so away from the foot of the hills that had cradled the cave that should have been their safe haven for a few days at least but which had almost become their tomb instead, before they stumble upon the place that Marcus had promised.

The trees begin to thin and a few moments later, they step out into a small clearing, sheltered by tall evergreen pines all around them and nestled beneath the tall protective sentinels standing guard is a small wood cabin with dark windows, like the hollow eyes she sees on too many people now. Apart from that though, it seems to have been incredibly well preserved here and, given how close it was to their original destination, she turns to him and asks, “Why didn’t you bring us here first? Instead of the cave?”

It’s only then she realises that Marcus has a gun half drawn at his hip and is moving much more cautiously than he has been up to this point, half glancing back round at her but never quite taking his eyes from the area around them, he tells her in a low voice that, “I wasn’t sure if we would have it to ourselves or if someone else might have staked a claim on it already. And it was a little small for all of us, but since it’s just you and me, and since desperate times call for desperate measures, I decided to roll the dice on it.”

“Good choice.” She murmurs lightly, glancing around them and thinking that it would be nice to sleep in a place with a roof and four solid walls again, and maybe even a bed, if they’re lucky.

Tentatively, Marcus moves forwards, gun drawn and held ready at his side, pushing into the cabin through the door in front, which needs a sharp shove to encourage it to move, rusted iron hinges screaming in protest so loudly that it makes her wince, sure it will draw someone, or something, down on them.

It doesn’t however, and it doesn’t draw anything out of the cabin either, except for a small mouse that scampers past her feet and bounds off into the thick grasses around them, looking for somewhere more peaceful to take refuge.

Keeping her firmly behind him with one slightly raised arm, he takes a few cautious steps inside, some of the floorboards creaking and groaning loudly beneath the soles of his boots when he moves to make them take his weight. Apart from the cabin and its old floors however, nothing else makes any open protest at their disturbing the quiet tranquillity of the place.

Dust rises in little puffs wherever she sets her feet down and the whole place is in need of airing out. In the grand scheme of things however, that’s not a complaint at all, and it’s looking like the apocalyptic version of a five star hotel to her right now. A little dark and a little musty smelling but she can quickly counter both of those, she thinks.

Marcus isn’t so quick to trust this place and the instincts that are telling her everything is alright and insists on moving first through the living room, then holding her there while he goes to investigate the only other room that’s separated from the main heart of the cabin by a door, the bedroom, where, to Abby’s delight, there is a large double bed squeezed inside and calling invitingly to her.

Once he’s satisfied Marcus returns to her, looking mildly pleased at last and she knows that it’s safe to start putting down some roots for the night. Dropping her back on the floor, she crosses over to the hearth in the middle of the room, grabs some of the logs and kindling stacked beside it and throws them into the fireplace.

 During her months wandering the wilderness, there are a few things she’s become rather adapt at that she would have laughed at, and one of those things is making and starting a fire. Within a few minutes she has a few small flames flickering and casting a pale lemon glow across the room, and they steadily begin catching the larger logs and spreading out and soon she knows it’ll be large and roaring and fill the room with a pleasant light and heat and sound.

Pushing herself up and glancing around, she realises that Marcus has moved to do the same thing in the bedroom to clear away a few more cobwebs and returns to her with a faint orange light dancing behind him, looking pleased with himself.

After they’ve done that, they let themselves collapse into the slightly moth-eaten sofa in front of the living room fire, kicking off their boots in unison and groaning as they let the flames warm their blistered, by now sharply complaining feet. It’s a few minutes before she feels obliged to do anything more than sit here, eyes closed, feet warming and soothing nicely, her head dropping down absently to rest lightly on Marcus’ shoulder, but that’s before she realises how hungry she is, and once that thought hits her she quickly becomes ravenous.

With a certain reluctance, she forces herself up and crosses over to where she had dumped her pack upon emptying it, rummaging around in it and finding them a few tins of soup which, after a few minutes, Marcus devises a way of heating over their new fires and not long after that they’re curled back up on the sofa, enjoying some hot chicken broth and letting themselves relax for the first time all day.

Neither of them talks much to begin with, preferring to eat, but once they’ve finished their food, both of them wake up a little and start attending to other tasks, namely checking the injuries they’ve sustained on their adventures, which she starts by flatly demanding to see his wounds.

Kneeling down in front of him while he remains on the sofa, she starts to doctor to them, cleaning and bandaging a few, while he does the same with her in return. All in all, she’s amazed at how lucky he was, despite having been trapped in that explosion and trapped there until she came to rescue him, he’s sustained relatively few injuries, and none of them particularly worrying or serious. He’s limping a little on the leg that was pinned but it’s clearly not broken, for which she’s grateful.

She had gotten off quite lightly as well, considering what she’d been through and the risks she had taken. Both of them feel duly lucky and grateful for that fact and it doesn’t take long for them to be patched up to the other’s satisfaction.

While they do that, he finally asks, with an air of contained impatience, as though he’s been sitting on this question for hours but waiting for the right time before he brought it up, “What happened? In the town, with the supply run?” She stops cleaning out a graze on his lower leg and looks up at him, giving him her full attention instead as he says, his voice brittle and cracked, “Where are the others? Are they safe or are they, are they-“ He wants to know, watching her intently for any sign, any tell that will answer his question before she speaks, and it’s plain on his face that he’s been putting off asking her that since she found him, afraid of the answer she might give him.

“No, no.” She tells him quickly, laying a gentle hand on his knee to try and reassure him, “They’re fine, they’re all fine, they’re safe. In that fallout bunker that you mentioned to me when you were telling me about this place. They’ll be alright there until we get back to them.”

Looking visibly relieved to hear that, he nods gratefully, chewing over her words for a moment then repeats his first question again, “What about the town? What happened there?”

Taking a deep breath, she tells him in as much detail as she can remember to limit the questions he’ll undoubtedly pepper her with as she explains. She tells him about arriving there, the boarded up houses and shops, the few of which they broke in to to have a look around were completely gutted and empty. Then she moves on to explain about the supermarket in the centre of town, the strange dates on all of the foods and medicines that Octavia pointed out, the fact that it seemed as though no-one had lived there a while before the apocalypse even began.

When she starts to talk about the Synths that had cornered them there and tried to kill them, he curses harshly, his hand balling into a tight fist, but she keeps talking, finding it easier to just keep going now that she’s started, the story pouring more freely out of her all in one go rather than in fits and starts, and he lets her talk, his eyes blazing and intense and full of fury but he doesn’t interrupt her. 

Pausing a moment to take another deep, steadying breath, she plunges on, explaining what Raven had discovered about their little welcoming party, that they had been there the whole time and how they had unwittingly stumbled upon a disguised base of operations. That and the drones in the air, the fact that they knew they were there and where the camp was, where he was as well.

She finds herself faltering there for the first time she began and needs to stop and wait several moments, trying to settle herself out, reminding herself that everything worked out alright in the end, that she doesn’t have anything to be afraid of now that she has him back, before she can go on.

The story of the bunker, how she had managed to reach it, the instructions that she had given to the others all comes pouring out of her and, though she’s said most of this to the fire, the dancing flames consuming her words as steadily as they burn through the logs in their heart, as she draws to the end, she turns and looks him straight in the eyes to tell him the end of her story.

“I knew that I had to find you.” She murmurs softly, “The others wanted me to wait until things had calmed down, when it would be safer, but I knew that I had to go, that it couldn’t wait, that I had to get to you.” Shuddering slightly at the memory that wells up in her next, she swallows hard and says, “When I got out of the tunnels, I was trying to find the cave, to figure out which direction to go in when I, when I saw it.”

She breaks off again, visibly shaking now, despite the warmth that’s pleasantly flooded the room around them. He places a hand lightly on her back, his fingers rubbing up and down along her spine between the valley of her shoulder blades, a spot that, he seems to instinctively know, relaxes and calms her and, after taking several moments and deep breaths to compose herself she manages to keep going, “I saw the explosion.” She whispers faintly, meeting his eyes again, needing him to see her fear, to see the emotion, the panic that had reared up in her then haunting her eyes, needing him to understand, “I knew that they must have targeted you, the camp, in retaliation for the patrol we had taken out in the town.”

Trembling, it takes her much longer this time to be able to look up and tell him shakily, “I panicked. I thought that you were gone, that it had killed you. I could, I could _feel_ you slipping away from me, I could feel you fading and that...That _terrified_ me.”

She breathes, shaking her head, finding herself instinctively moving in a little closer to him and his arm reaches up and wraps snugly around her shoulders, drawing her in as well, “I wasn’t, I wasn’t ready to let go of you, I, I couldn’t lose you, I knew that I couldn’t lose you, not after everything that we’d been through and everything that I, I-”

She breaks off, hesitating for a moment before she makes a firm and definite decision and says forcefully, “Not after everything that I felt for you and all of the things that I hadn’t said to you that I knew I needed to say, that I needed you to hear.” Shaking her head and looking up at him, hoping to find understanding and empathy in her eyes to her next words, an indication that he knows what she’s talking about, that he’s felt it too, “I wasn’t ready to lose the connection that seems to be between us, all of the things that I feel when I’m with you, when you’re beside me.”

Finding that in his eyes, finding that connection again, that understanding, she finds herself whispering softly, “This feels right. You and me, here together it feels...It feels like something I had half forgotten, something that I lost a long time ago that I never thought that I would feel again.”

Licking her lips and swallowing hard past the growing swell of emotion in her throat, she says as steadily and clearly as she can, “When Jake died, my world fell apart at the same rate this planet did. What I went through then, what I felt, what I lost, what that did to me it...It destroyed me and left me to try and rebuild from the ashes. And I did. I did that, I made it, I survived, I got them through it, my people, my family, I did it for them. But, but there was still something missing, even when I thought that I was as whole and as _okay_ as I was ever going to be there was still a huge, gaping hole where I had once had Jake, where I had once had everything.”

Trailing off, she struggles with herself for a moment, not sure quite how to keep going but he’s patient and his hand resumes rubbing gently at her back and that helps and she manages to go on, words pouring out of her without as much thought or consideration now, feeling more than thinking them.

“After that, after he died, with the way that things were, the world in the state that it was in, the constant battle with, with everything just to live, just to exist...I didn’t think that I would ever even have a chance to find anyone again.” She murmurs, shaking her head and meeting his eyes again, “I never thought that I would ever have that again, I never thought that I could. It just seemed so difficult and I was sure that it would be too painful for me to ever even attempt to feel the way that I had about Jake about anyone ever again. The idea of ever really being with someone again, even trying to be was...Overwhelming and just...Impossible.”

Turning around a little more so that she’s directly facing him on the sofa a faint, almost shy smile threatens to tug at her lips and she says quietly, “But with you...I can’t ignore what I feel, what’s happening anymore. And with you I...I want to try with you. I want to try and make it work, whatever it is and to whatever extent that it can work. I want to try and be with you. I want to try and feel that again. I want to try and fall in love with you, Marcus...And I think I’m already some of the way there.”

Hesitating, she takes several slow shaky breaths, biting her lip nervously as she asks softly, “Do you, do you understand?”

“Yes.” He whispers, feeling as though he’s breathing for the first time since the world ended, since it ended that first time, in the middle of that cold industrial estate, when it wasn’t destroyed by a barrage of nuclear bombs but by a single bullet to the heart.

Everything she’s just said, everything she’s just confessed to him, everything she’s just told him that she experienced, he did too. And he’s on the same page as her, in the same place as her, he knows that he is, relief and something that might be happiness; which he hasn’t felt in so long he had forgotten what it was like, what it could really be like, courses through him when he looks into her eyes and sees everything he’s been trying to bottle up for weeks now reflected fully and easily in her eyes.

“Yes.” He breathes again, shifting forwards slightly and reaching out, finding her hand and lightly lacing their fingers together as he struggles to put his own thoughts into words for her.

“I felt the same way that you did, losing Jake, that same despair and hopelessness and abandon when I lost my partner. Everything, everything changed then, in a way that I thought was irreparable. I become something that I could come back from when she died.”

 He stumbles a little, not having spoken about this in so long, floundering a little but she lightly squeezes his hand and he finds himself pushing on regardless, “I was lost after her death. Broken, beyond redemption or repair. It...It changed me, and not in a good way. People told me that this wasn’t the end, that, people changed, and when they changed, their needs and their wants for another person changed too. Just because I had lost her didn’t mean that I couldn’t find someone else that I couldn’t be happy with someone else again.”

Pausing a beat, he takes several shallow, shaky breaths before he goes on unsteadily, “I didn’t want to hear any of that. I didn’t want someone new I wanted someone that I had buried too soon. I convinced myself that I was better off alone, that, that now that she was dead that was for the best, I was better off on my own, that felt like the way that it was all just supposed to be for me.”

Looking up he sees her nodding and he knows from the look in her eyes that she understands, in a way that only she could, because she experienced the same thing losing the man that she had loved.

“When I met you...I felt something, from the first moment that I saw you, that we were in the same space there was, there was-“

“A connection.” She supplies faintly.

Nodding he seizes on that, “A connection between us.” He murmurs softly, “I felt something for you, and you made me feel, you made _feel_ again when I had been numb for so long that I had begun to forget what anything except emptiness actually felt like.”

Her fingers reach out to him, making as though to lightly brush his cheek but falling short at the last moment so he captures her hand in his once more and holds it tight, understanding her need for closeness, for contact, and responding to it in kind.

“You made me feel like I was actually alive again.” He whispers softly, “I died the same day that she did. And the day I met you, that first day that we fought, that first night that we spent around that fire was like, like I had woken up again, like I had finally broken the surface and started breathing again.”

Pausing, he fumbles for a moment, struggling to put his next sentiments into words but somehow he manages, feeling clumsy and awkward about it but just needing to get it out there somehow, “We both resisted it for a while, for a long while, probably longer than we should have, but it was there and it got to the point that I didn’t want to be alone anymore, that that wasn’t enough anymore. It had been enough for half a life, for the one that I had been living after I lost her but it wasn’t enough now. I wanted more, I wanted...”

He breaks off, falling just a little short of saying ‘you’ still knowing that there was more that he wanted to say to her before he reached that pitch and instead he tails and off and changes the subject a little, saying, with a faint little laugh, “I wasn’t sure if you felt the same way about me. I wasn’t sure if you _could_ feel the same way about me, I-“

“I do.” She interrupts quietly, moving in even closer to him again to the point that he’s almost sure he can see her very soul stirring in her eyes. This time, when she stretches her hand out, her fingers make it to his face and tenderly caress his cheek, making him shiver, “I do feel the same way about you.” She whispers softly. Laughing a little herself, a definite smile stretching across her face she says, “You’re right. We should have done this sooner. We should have said all of this sooner. Days ago, _weeks_ ago.”

“You’re saying it now.” He breathes faintly.

“Yes.” She murmurs back, in a tone that makes his heart flutter in his chest, “Yes, I am...” She murmurs, pressing herself forwards and into his arms, trusting him to catch her and draw her in against him, which he does, “I’m saying that I’m sure. I’m saying that I know what I want now...And what I want is this, whatever this is, whatever it might be.”

He nods, leaning forwards and tucking a loose strand of her hair behind her ear, his thumb lightly caressing her cheek as he does so, “I’m sure too. I want this too.” He whispers.

“And I want you, Marcus Kane.” She breathes softly to him, her eyes closing, her head tilting slightly, leaning in closer to him, “If you want me?”

“Yes.” He gasps softly to her, so close to her now that his breath dances hot against her mouth with every word that he says to her, “Yes. I want you too, Abby.”

His hand slides from her cheek to the back of her head, his fingers sliding and tangling through her hair and he draws in nearer and nearer to her, his eyes closing slowly, giving her every chance to change her mind or pull away from him. 

She doesn’t. She reaches forwards, grabbing the front of his worn leather jacket, gripping as tightly as she can and pulling him in towards her until his chest is pressed up flat against hers and he can feel the heat from her body pulsing against him with every breath that she takes.

His lips brush softly against hers, the faintest of questions and invitations all wrapped up in one light, tender motion. Her lips answer both at once, so definitely and surely that it overwhelms his faint caution and pushes them both over into the realm of certainty, responding in a way that tells him that she meant what she said about them having waited too long, that they should have done this so much sooner.

Her kiss is rough and hot and hard and she crashes down against him at the same time, her body pressing flat against his, her hands pressed up hard against his chest, still grabbing large fistfuls of his jacket and holding him close against her, not letting them part for even an instant, craving him, needing him now that she has him, not willing to let even a crack of space open up between them now that they’ve joined together at last.

Pushing him down into the sofa she lets her lips open against his, giving him a taste of her and feeling him answer fully, making her groan with longing and pleasure, both enjoying what he’s giving her and wanting, _demanding_ more of him at the same time, which he seems only too pleased to deliver.

Heat rises between them, kindled from the friction between their bodies as she makes the kiss a little rougher still and he answers that by tugging lightly on her hair, introducing another level of tension between them, as though there wasn’t enough already.

Gripping both halves of his jacket, she begins to lose patience with this as things begin to accelerate to a howling crescendo between them and she starts wrestling his jacket from him at the same time pulling slightly away from him, one hand on his arm once she’s worked it from its sleeve, dragging her with him, coaxing him up and onto his feet, determinedly not breaking the kiss between them.

He understands what she wants and reaching forwards, takes the initiative and strips her jacket from her as well, letting it pool on the floor nearby where she had discarded his own. Then he wraps his arms tightly and securely about her waist, lifting her up in his arms and bracing her against him, forcing them to part for a moment, both panting.

As she looks down at him, she sees his eyes open and hungry for her, full of lust and desire, fire pulsing and burning in them in a way that she can’t resist. Leaning down again as he turns and starts to carry her towards the bedroom, she kisses him again, her fingers running through his hair, pulling on it and making him focus completely on her, bracing her against the wall opposite in order to kiss her properly the way she’s demanding that he kiss her.

Gasping faintly she tilts her head back, allowing him better access as his lips move from her mouth to her neck, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of her shirt and opening them up. Her hands on his shoulders too busy revelling in the heat and pleasure that’s radiating from her skin everywhere his mouth touches she finds herself whispering his name.

Growling roughly in response he secures her again in his arms and moves back into the bedroom, her shirt now slipping down her shoulders, loose, unbuttoned all the way down to the naval, bearing her to him and inviting his hands to skim over the skin he’s uncovered, hot and heaving as she pants for breath, still running a little short after his kisses.

He’s surprisingly gentle when he tips her out of his arms and gently down onto the bed beneath her, before following her, his body crashing into hers and making her whimper softly, reaching up and pulling him more firmly against him, kissing him again meaning that they both have to blindly fumble at each other’s clothes to pull them off.

Somehow they manage it and in what feels like no time at all, they’re both completely naked, with nothing separating them anymore but sheets and sweat and skin and that’s all still far too much for her taste. And so she firmly lets him know as she tugs him down on top of her, her arms wrapping around his torso and holding him against her as she kisses him once more.

She’s almost unbearably hot beneath him. As though there’s a fever pulsing in her veins, as though there’s a fire raging just beneath her skin, burning her up and struggling to claim him too. And if that’s the price he has to pay for tonight he’ll pay it gladly, and keep paying it until there’s nothing left of him but smoke and ash and the lingering whisper of her name held upon his lips like a prayer.

His hands run over the surface of her skin, smooth and supple, flowing beneath his fingertips like polished marble, as delicate and responsive as fine silk, parting before his hands, utterly addictive and intoxicating, both pitching him on a high and filling him with a desperate need for more of her all at the same time.

Dragging his fingers through her hair again he hears her breathe her name again and that sends a shiver running through him from the base of his spine spreading out through the rest of him. It feels as though he was made for this, it feels as though they were both made for this, for this one moment, when their bodies fit together so well he could have sworn that they had been created from one whole being and splintered and separated. But all of his broken edges curve around hers so well that he knows that this is right, that he’s home now, that this is where he belongs, and where she belongs with him.

A hot haze descends upon her as he looks into her eyes, his fingers twining through hers again, squeezing gently, asking her if she’s alright, if she’s ready and she nods desperately and clings onto him, her nails scraping down along his spine as he slips inside her. Her eyes close and his fingers tug gently at her hair and then it’s all just instinct and heat and feeling and she ceases having any control over what’s happening, she just lies back and holds him close and lets it happen.

Their bodies quickly fall into a rhythm with one another and that’s all that matters anymore. If there’s anything out there except them in that moment she never knows and she never cares. He’s here, he’s here with her, looking into her eyes, gasping her name in her ear even as she gasps his, making her feel so much that she’s sure she’s going to split along all of her frayed and broken seams. But he’s with her, his arms around her, his lips on hers and she doesn’t care if she shatters, if she crumbles into dust as long as she doesn’t have to leave him, as long as he stays with her that’s all she needs, that’s all she wants.

They take things slow, for all their heat and their desire and desperation, they slow things right down as much as they can stand it, they indulge in this. She commits every light touch, every tug on her hair, every kiss that’s pressed down to her lips to memory, she savours it, she indulges in it, she lives in it, in these moments that make her feel truly alive for the first time in so long. She’s being reborn in the heat and fire of their bodies crashing into one another over and over again and the smoke of their gasps and moans as they mingle in the swirling air around them and it feels good, it feels right, it feels worth it, all of it, it’s all been worth it to reach this moment here with him.

Afterwards, both of them in a state of exhilarated bliss, breathless and happily exhausted, they collapse down together, their limbs tangled together, her head on his chest, her hair fanned out across his skin, his fingers still trailing gently and absently through it. His heart hammers beneath her, she can hear it, she can feel it, and it’s the most reassuring, comforting sound she thinks she’s ever heard. 

A soft smile ghosts over her lips that he can’t seem to resist pressing a quiet kiss to. A moment later, he lifts up the sheets around them and covers her up in them, wrapping them around her and pressing her in against him, making her feel warm and safe and whole.

Her eyes close and she finds herself, for the first time, slipping off peacefully and contentedly into sleep, with his arms around her and his fingers still tangled through her hair, what waits on the other side holds no fear for her anymore. He’s here, he’s here with her, he won’t let anything happen to her, she knows, and she slips off quietly into dreams.

****

Sunlight streams through the window beside the bed, thin fingers pushing insistently through the slats of the shutters that neither of them had bothered to properly close the night before. That wakes her and makes her open her eyes sleepily.

A second later, she finds herself completely awake, pushing herself up in bed, the sheets sliding away from her, but she doesn’t care. The light that spills across them is bright gold, the way she remembers it to be, the dawn sky outside streaked with dusky oranges and light, blood reds. The trees are lush and full and green in the warm light of day. The rest of the sky is a bright, blissful blue beyond the influence of the sun’s rays.

Glancing down, she sees Marcus awake, his eyes open watching her experience all of this. And she knows from the look on his face that he sees exactly what she sees. Leaning down, she presses a soft, happy little kiss good morning to his lips again then sits up once more, staring around her in awe, savouring this, this sight she thought that she would never see again.

For the first time since the world ended, as she looks around and soaks in the world as it’s meant to be, with colour bursting from every inch of it, every new thing her eyes light upon demanding her full attention now that she can see all of it, she feels a real flicker of hope take root in her chest, slowly sinking in to her and blooming as she begins to believe that they might all get through this yet.

**END**

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! (and that it wasn't too long >.


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